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White Supremacists Targeting Tea Party Movement for Infiltration & Possible Takeover

Com­ment: It real­ly should­n’t come as a great sur­prise, but white suprema­cist ele­ments are tar­get­ing the Tea Par­ty move­ment for infil­tra­tion and co- option. With the GOP’s his­to­ry of involve­ment with Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments, they should­n’t be too far out of the Repub­li­can main­stream.

“Tea Par­ty Rejects Racist Label, but Con­cerns Remain” by Judy L. Thomas; Kansas City Star; 7/15/2010.

Excerpt: Bil­ly Rop­er is a write-in can­di­date for gov­er­nor of Arkansas and an unapolo­getic white nation­al­ist.

“I don’t want non-whites in my coun­try in any form or fash­ion or any sta­tus,” he says.

Rop­er also is a tea par­ty mem­ber who says he has been gath­er­ing sup­port for his cause by attend­ing tea par­ty ral­lies.

“We go to these tea par­ties all over the coun­try,” Rop­er said. “We’re look­ing for the younger, poten­tial­ly more rad­i­cal peo­ple.”

Accu­sa­tions about racism with­in the tea par­ty have rum­bled for a year, but they sud­den­ly explod­ed this week with a res­o­lu­tion at the NAACP con­ven­tion in Kansas City say­ing the par­ty is attract­ing peo­ple and groups hos­tile to minori­ties.

The alle­ga­tions prompt­ed irate denials from tea par­ty sup­port­ers, and even crit­ics make it clear that they’re not accus­ing all tea par­ties or par­ty mem­bers of racism.

Indeed, it’s dif­fi­cult to answer the racism ques­tion because the tea par­ty is split into hun­dreds of shards, and the issue of racism depends some­what on per­cep­tions.

Still, it’s clear that some with racist agen­das are try­ing to make inroads into the par­ty.

In sev­er­al instances, tea par­ty mem­bers with racist back­grounds such as Rop­er have played a role in par­ty events. At the same time, The Kansas City Star has found, white nation­al­ist groups are encour­ag­ing mem­bers to attend tea par­ties. One orga­ni­za­tion based in St. Louis is spon­sor­ing tea par­ties of its own.

“There def­i­nite­ly is racism with­in the tea par­ty move­ment,” said Daryle Lam­ont Jenk­ins, an African-Amer­i­can and a spokesman for One People’s Project, a Philadel­phia-based group that mon­i­tors racism. “I’ve seen it, and it’s some­thing they need to deal with now.”

The tea par­ty absolute­ly rejects the racist label, for a num­ber of rea­sons.

Many deny out­right that any inci­dents of racism have occurred. They point out that there are minori­ties in the tea par­ty and that tea par­ties are endors­ing minor­i­ty can­di­dates in some races.

Oth­ers say racism may be occur­ring, but only on the fringes of a move­ment that is so decen­tral­ized that 69 tea par­ties exist in Mis­souri and 24 more in Kansas. Nonethe­less, some in the par­ty have tried to police inci­dents of racism and turn away white suprema­cists.

Bren­dan Stein­hauser, direc­tor of cam­paigns for Free­dom­Works, which orga­nizes tea par­ties, acknowl­edges that some racist groups may be try­ing to “glom” onto the move­ment. But “where we see that behav­ior, we’re going to call them out,” he said.

He not­ed that one tea par­ty in Hous­ton helped expose a tea par­ty leader who alleged­ly made a racist poster.
“Racism is some­thing we find moral­ly repug­nant,” Stein­hauser said. “It dam­ages the move­ment, and it’s just not good for our image or our mes­sage.”

At the same time, Stein­hauser down­plays actu­al racist inci­dents, say­ing he hasn’t seen any him­self.
“Are there infil­tra­tors com­ing in to try to make it look racist or extrem­ist? Yes,” he said. “Are there peo­ple that may have those kinds of views that are show­ing up at our events try­ing to be a part of the move­ment? Sure. But if you talk to 99.9 per­cent of these peo­ple, that’s not what they believe.”

But for Leonard Zeskind, who has writ­ten a his­to­ry of the white nation­al­ist move­ment, the prob­lem is obvi­ous.
“There are hard-core racists brew­ing inside the tea par­ty move­ment,” said Zeskind, author of “Blood and Pol­i­tics” and a Kansas City res­i­dent. “They see tea par­ties not only as recruit­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, but as vehi­cles to cross over into main­stream Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.”

Is it racism?

For many tea partiers, racism is in the eye of the behold­er.

Take Ron Wight, who stood with dozens of tea par­ty activists at the J.C. Nichols Memo­r­i­al Foun­tain in April, com­plain­ing about the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, its social­ist agen­da and being called a racist.

Those like him who com­plain about Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma are accused of racism, lament­ed the semi-retired music teacher from Lee’s Sum­mit.

Then he added: “If I was a black man, I’d get down on my knees and thank God for slav­ery. Oth­er­wise, I could be dying of AIDS now in Africa.”

Wight doesn’t con­sid­er that com­ment to be racist.

“I wish slav­ery had nev­er hap­pened,” he said. “But there are some black peo­ple alive today who have nev­er suf­fered one day what the peo­ple who were black went through in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Has some­body said some­thing stu­pid or done some­thing stu­pid? Yes, there have been inci­dents.

“But with every­thing that has been done in this coun­try legal­ly and social­ly for the black man, it’s almost like they’ve been giv­en a great leg up.”

Signs at tea par­ty events that have drawn crit­i­cism also have defend­ers.

One poster says: “What’s the dif­fer­ence between the Cleve­land Zoo and the White House? The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African!”

Anoth­er depicts Oba­ma as a trib­al witch doc­tor, wear­ing a head­dress and a bone through his nose, with the words “Oba­macare: Com­ing soon to a clin­ic near you.”

While some tea par­ty events turn away signs that might be offen­sive, it’s not always clear that they depict racism, par­ty mem­bers say.

Anoth­er con­cern — even with­in the tea par­ty — is the actions of some who are in lead­er­ship posi­tions.

A pho­to cir­cu­lat­ing on the web shows Dale Robert­son, founder and pres­i­dent of Hous­ton-based TeaParty.org — also called the 1776 Tea Par­ty — at a 2009 ral­ly car­ry­ing a sign that said: “Con­gress = Slave Own­er, Tax­pay­er = Nig­gar.”

In an inter­view, Robert­son denied his sign was racist, say­ing some­one altered the pic­ture on the web.
“The orig­i­nal sign said ‘slave,’ and some­body changed it to the N‑word,” he said. But then he defend­ed the use of the word.

“I looked the word up in Web­ster, and it says it means polit­i­cal­ly unrep­re­sent­ed,” he said.

Robert­son also sent a fundrais­ing e‑mail that con­tained a pic­ture depict­ing Oba­ma as what some describe as a stereo­typ­i­cal black pimp with a thin mus­tache and wear­ing a zebra-striped fedo­ra trimmed in white fur with a black feath­er on top.

Robert­son said alle­ga­tions of racism in the tea par­ty are com­ing from “peo­ple who have an agen­da, and all they want to do is slan­der this move­ment.”

But some tea par­ty groups have denounced Robert­son.

“We do not choose to asso­ciate with peo­ple that use his type of dis­gust­ing lan­guage,” the Hous­ton Tea Par­ty Soci­ety said in a state­ment issued on its web­site.

The Tea Par­ty Patri­ots also shunned Robert­son.

“We stand firm­ly against any expres­sion of racism and the kind of lan­guage and opin­ion expressed in his (N‑word) sign,” the group said.

The Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens, a St. Louis-based group that pro­motes the preser­va­tion of the white race, has spon­sored its own tea par­ties in some South­ern states.

The council’s web­site has referred to blacks as “a ret­ro­grade species of human­i­ty” and said non-white immi­gra­tion would turn the coun­try into a “slimy brown mass of glop.”

Gor­don Baum, the group’s founder, told The Star that the coun­cil encour­ages mem­bers to par­tic­i­pate in tea par­ties.

He described the tea par­ty ral­lies as “main­ly a white thing, because there’s not a whole lot of blacks that par­tic­i­pate, and the ones that do get to be speak­ers.”

That leads some groups into a bizarre hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty, he said.

“They have black speak­ers, and some­times when they can’t get one lined up, they just get some poor dev­il that’s on their side, black guy, in the audi­ence and drag him up on stage,” he said.

Some oth­er white suprema­cy groups also see tea par­ties as recruit­ing grounds.

Rop­er, a for­mer orga­niz­er for the neo-Nazi Nation­al Alliance and now chair­man of White Rev­o­lu­tion, said he has been attend­ing tea par­ty ral­lies to recruit mem­bers and gar­ner sup­port for his 2010 write-in cam­paign for Arkansas gov­er­nor.

Rop­er, a mem­ber of the ResistNet.com tea par­ty, said in an inter­view that he sees tea par­ties as a base of sup­port.

Have tea par­ties been recep­tive?

“It varies,” he said. “If I go to some of the larg­er tea par­ties, I’ll find a few dozen peo­ple at least who are see­ing the world through the same lens­es I have.”

Rop­er said he was kicked out of one tea par­ty ral­ly by a man who said racists weren’t wel­come.
“I told him I’m not a white suprema­cist,” Rop­er said. “I’m a sep­a­ratist.”

For­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has post­ed a video on his web­site address­ing tea par­ty sup­port­ers. Duke says in the video that the major­i­ty of tea par­ty activists “oppose affir­ma­tive action and diver­si­ty, which are noth­ing more than pro­grams of racist dis­crim­i­na­tion against white peo­ple.”

Tea par­ty on racism

Last fall, the Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens put fliers pro­mot­ing the group on cars at a tea par­ty event in Vir­ginia. In response, lead­ers of the Roanoke Tea Par­ty pub­licly dis­avowed the coun­cil.

In April, an Alaba­ma attor­ney who was sched­uled to speak at a tea par­ty ral­ly in Wausau, Wis., was asked to with­draw after it was revealed that he had a his­to­ry of speak­ing at white suprema­cist events.

Those are among sev­er­al exam­ples of tea par­ties mak­ing it clear they don’t sup­port racist views.

At the same time, though, sup­port­ers want to make sure racist inci­dents aren’t blown out of pro­por­tion.
“We’ve got to rec­og­nize that there are freaks at both ends and they will attempt to attach them­selves to legit­i­mate move­ments,” said Woody Cozad, a for­mer chair­man of the Mis­souri Repub­li­can Par­ty who has spo­ken at tea par­ty events.

“But that does not say any­thing about the move­ment unless the move­ment endors­es or embraces them, which the tea par­ty has not done that I know of.”

Indeed, some tea partiers say they haven’t seen racism at all.

Lloyd Mar­cus, a black con­ser­v­a­tive and musi­cian who has both spo­ken and enter­tained at tea par­ty ral­lies, said he has been to 200 events and nev­er wit­nessed any racist inci­dents.

“It’s women, it’s fam­i­lies, it’s grand­par­ents, it’s kids,” Mar­cus said. “The decent folks that I meet at the tea par­ties, to be called a racist is dev­as­tat­ing to them.”

Ward Con­ner­ly, a con­ser­v­a­tive African-Amer­i­can who has spo­ken at numer­ous tea par­ty events, said he has no qualms about the tea par­ty move­ment.

“I’ve prob­a­bly spo­ken at over 20 tea par­ty events in the last three months, and I’m con­vinced that these folks are ordi­nary peo­ple who are frus­trat­ed with gov­ern­ment,” he said.

Con­ner­ly acknowl­edged that minori­ties are scarce at tea par­ty events he’s attend­ed, but he attrib­uted it to “the atti­tude that minori­ties often have about the polit­i­cal process.”

Some­times lan­guage dif­fer­ences hold back blacks and Lati­nos, he said, while those of Asian descent don’t par­tic­i­pate in polit­i­cal events unless it relates to what they see as their own iden­ti­ty.

Many also are com­plain­ing about racism on the oth­er side. They accuse the NAACP of fail­ing to denounce racist inci­dents by African-Amer­i­cans, such as vot­er intim­i­da­tion by the New Black Pan­ther Par­ty dur­ing the 2008 elec­tions.

“There’s no room for that kind of vit­ri­olic lan­guage in a civ­i­lized demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety,” NAACP spokesman Chris Flem­ing said Thurs­day about the vot­er inci­dents.

Watch­dog fears

Those who mon­i­tor hate groups are wor­ried about racism in the tea par­ty.

“There are prob­a­bly close to a cou­ple thou­sand of these local tea par­ty chap­ters now,” said Devin Burghart, vice pres­i­dent of the Insti­tute for Research and Edu­ca­tion on Human Rights, which is final­iz­ing a spe­cial report on tea par­ties.

“A num­ber of these groups have been either thor­ough­ly infil­trat­ed by more hard-core folks, or at least those more hard-core folks are allowed to swim in that same ocean.”

As exam­ples, Burghart cit­ed Robert­son, as well as some speak­ers pro­mot­ed by tea par­ties, such as Red Beck­man, an anti-Semi­te who was once evict­ed from his land by the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice for refus­ing to pay tax­es.

The racism isn’t com­ing only from the fringe, Burghart said.

“This is not just a nut show­ing up in the audi­ence with a crazy sign,” Burghart said. “It’s some­one who they vet­ted and decid­ed to give a plat­form to.”

Zeskind said racist ten­den­cies may be broad­er with­in the par­ty than even crit­ics real­ize. . . .

Discussion

19 comments for “White Supremacists Targeting Tea Party Movement for Infiltration & Possible Takeover”

  1. Uh oh, it looks like some­one almost every­one did­n’t get the “don’t act like a giant racist” memo at this year’s CPAC:

    TPM
    CPAC Event On Racial Tol­er­ance Turns To Chaos As ‘Dis­en­fran­chised’ Whites Arrive
    Ben­jy Sar­lin March 15, 2013, 5:11 PM

    A CPAC ses­sion spon­sored by Tea Par­ty Patri­ots and billed as a primer on teach­ing activists how to court black vot­ers devolved into a shout­ing match as some atten­dees demand­ed jus­tice for white vot­ers and oth­ers shout­ed down a black woman who react­ed in hor­ror.

    The ses­sion, enti­tled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” was led by K. Carl Smith, a black con­ser­v­a­tive who most­ly urged atten­dees to deflect racism charges by call­ing them­selves “Fred­er­ick Dou­glass Repub­li­cans.”

    Dis­rup­tions began when he began accus­ing Democ­rats of still being the par­ty of the Con­fed­er­a­cy — a com­mon talk­ing point on the right.

    “I don’t care how much the KKK improved,” he said. “I’m not going to join the KKK. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty found­ed the KKK.”

    Lines like that drew shouts of praise from some atten­dees and mur­murs of dis­ap­proval from one non-con­ser­v­a­tive black attendee, Kim Brown, a radio host and pro­duc­er with Voice of Rus­sia, a broad­cast­ing ser­vice of the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment.

    But then ques­tions and answers began. And things went off the rails.

    Scott Ter­ry of North Car­oli­na, accom­pa­nied by a Con­fed­er­ate-flag-clad attendee, Matthew Heim­bach, rose to say he took offense to the event’s take on slav­ery. (Heim­bach found­ed the White Stu­dents Union at Tow­son Uni­ver­si­ty and is described as a “white nation­al­ist” by the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter.)

    “It seems to be that you’re reach­ing out to vot­ers at the expense of young white South­ern males,” Ter­ry said, adding he “came to love my peo­ple and cul­ture” who were “being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised.”

    Smith respond­ed that Dou­glass for­gave his slave­mas­ter.

    “For giv­ing him food? And shel­ter?” Ter­ry said.

    At this point the event devolved into a mess of shout­ing. Orga­niz­ers calmed things down by ask­ing every­one to “take the debate out­side after the pre­sen­ta­tion.”

    ...

    Chad Chap­man, 21, one of the few black atten­dees, said over­all he enjoyed the event — except “there were lots of inter­rup­tions, main­ly because of the woman.”

    I asked whether he was con­cerned about the ques­tion from Ter­ry and Heim­bach.

    “No they were just telling the truth,” he said. You mean he agrees blacks are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chis­ing whites, I asked?

    “I lis­ten to anybody’s point of view, it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter,” he said.

    Sec­onds after the event end­ed, a media scrum formed around Ter­ry. A woman wear­ing a Tea Par­ty Patri­ots CPAC cre­den­tial who had shout­ed down Brown ear­li­er urged him not to give his name to the press.

    She wouldn’t give her name either, but I asked her what she thought.

    “Look, you know there’s no doubt the white males are get­ting real­ly beat up right now, it’s unfair,” she said. “I agree with that. My husband’s one of them. But I don’t think there’s a clear under­stand­ing about what real­ly is going on. He needs to read Fred­er­ick Dou­glass and I think that ques­tion should be asked to every­one in this room who is debat­ing.”

    Odd­ly enough, the unnamed woman end­ed up talk­ing to Brown after­wards and it actu­al­ly approached some­thing of a con­struc­tive dia­logue, even if she kicked it out by com­plain­ing about an “enti­tle­ment men­tal­i­ty” among lib­er­al African Amer­i­cans. She explained that despite appear­ing out­ward­ly white, she was one quar­ter Kore­an and her mother’s side of the fam­i­ly had been called “Japs” in the 1950s. She added she had got­ten heat from “white men” who mocked her for going to a uni­ver­si­ty, Berkley, over its large Asian pop­u­la­tion with­out know­ing she was Asian her­self.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 15, 2013, 2:30 pm
  2. One of the strangest aspects of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy is how lit­tle inter­est there gen­er­al­ly is in the pri­maries giv­en how much more influ­en­tial a vote in a pri­ma­ry can be com­pared to a vote in the gen­er­al elec­tion giv­en the rel­a­tive­ly low vot­er turnout for pri­maries and the de fac­to one-par­ty rule for so many state and local elec­tions. Plus, when you vote in the pri­ma­ry, you get to vote against all the can­di­dates like this:

    Nor­wich Bul­letin
    August 07. 2014 5:39PM
    Pro­bate can­di­date’s hus­band admits to his­to­ry with white suprema­cy move­ment

    By John Pen­ney
    jpenney@norwichbulletin.com (860) 857‑6965

    The hus­band of a Plain­field attor­ney run­ning for a pro­bate judge seat was a mem­ber of a promi­nent neo-Nazi group for sev­er­al years, accord­ing to watch­dog groups, and cur­rent­ly main­tains a pro-white online blog.

    Rob Free­man is the hus­band of attor­ney Anna Zubko­va, of Plain­field, who is a can­di­date in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry for pro­bate judge. The elec­tion is Tues­day.

    Freeman’s blog, called “Mindweapons of Rag­narok,” has the tagline of “Once Aryan Skynet is self aware, it does­n’t mat­ter who threw the switch.”

    The Rag­narok web­site, which includes ref­er­ences to mytho­log­i­cal and sci­ence fic­tion-based end-of world sce­nar­ios, includes entries pro­mot­ing white pride. The lat­est entry is a reac­tion to his being “out­ed.”

    “So I’m ‘promi­nent’ and a ‘neo-Nazi?’ the entry states. “I don’t know that I’m promi­nent, and the neo-Nazis are the ones geno­cid­ing my wife’s peo­ple in East­ern Ukraine, fund­ed by the USA gov­ern­ment to the tune of 5 bil­lion dol­lars.”

    In anoth­er entry, Free­man speaks of white guilt.

    “White chil­dren are taught to feel guilty for being white,” it states. “White guilt makes white kids timid and ashamed of being white, and embold­ens oth­er races to attack them unpro­voked.”

    When asked about his spe­cif­ic views on race, Free­man dis­sem­bled at times.

    “There are dif­fer­ent groups,” he said. “Don’t you think East Africans are the best marathon run­ners? Cer­tain groups excel in areas oth­ers don’t. I believe in human bio-diver­si­ty.”

    Free­man admit­ted being part of the extreme right wing move­ment years ago, “until it died out.”

    “I think every group of peo­ple have legit­i­mate con­flicts of inter­est and I am for hav­ing an open con­ver­sa­tion about those con­flicts, not through vio­lence. I don’t wish ill of any­one.”

    Zubko­va will com­pete for the 27th Pro­bate Dis­trict judge­ship, which cov­ers Killing­ly, Plain­field, Can­ter­bury and Ster­ling, against fel­low Demo­c­rat Andrea Trup­pa in Tuesday’s pri­ma­ry elec­tion.

    Zubko­va and Free­man have been mar­ried for 17 years and have one daugh­ter, accord­ing to an inter­view con­duct­ed by a Bul­letin reporter. In a phone inter­view on Thurs­day, Zubko­va said she does not sub­scribe to her husband’s views and her fit­ness for the bench should not be tarred by his opin­ions.

    “He did not have those views when we mar­ried, but acquired them after,” she said. “What am I sup­posed to do? Divorce him? It’s not unusu­al for hus­bands and wives to have dif­fer­ent views. As a judge, I can assure you I would not dis­crim­i­nate against any­one, even based on their beliefs. In my career, I’ve rep­re­sent­ed clients from many dif­fer­ent back­grounds and races, all to the best of my knowl­edge and abil­i­ty.”

    Zubko­va gar­nered six of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic endors­ing com­mit­tee’s 16 votes dur­ing its con­ven­tion and was endorsed by the Plain­field Demo­c­ra­t­ic Town Com­mit­tee.

    Chair­man William Holmes said the com­mit­tee was unaware of Freeman’s views at the time of Zubkova’s endorsement.“If we had, there obvi­ous­ly would have been a con­ver­sa­tion before we pro­ceed­ed,” he said. “I would have pro­posed hold­ing back any endorse­ment until we could have researched the mat­ter.”

    Trup­pa declined to com­ment on the mat­ter, except to say she was “very shocked.”

    Plain­field First Select­man Paul Sweet, who endorsed Zubko­va, said learn­ing about Freeman’s his­to­ry was like “get­ting kicked in the stom­ach.”

    “I feel (Zubko­va) deceived us by omis­sion and I feel mis­led,” he said. “I’m pulling my sup­port and telling my friends and fam­i­ly to do the same. The signs on my lawn are com­ing up. There’s a lot of good peo­ple who made a deci­sion to sup­port her with­out hav­ing all the infor­ma­tion they need­ed.”

    Daryle Jenk­ins, founder of the One People’s Project, which keeps tabs on neo-Nazi groups, said his group became aware of Free­man about 10 years ago.

    “He was one of 300 neo-Nazis attend­ing a ral­ly in Penn­syl­va­nia and, before that, was at some anti-hate forums in Mass­a­chu­setts,” he said. “So we looked him up and cre­at­ed a bio of him.”

    Jenk­ins said his group has not turned up any infor­ma­tion that links Zubko­va to her husband’s activ­i­ties. He said Free­man was a mem­ber of the Nation­al Alliance, which the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter said “was for decades the most dan­ger­ous and best orga­nized neo-Nazi for­ma­tion in Amer­i­ca.”

    “He went off the radar for a while before he popped up again with his web­site,” Jenk­ins said. “The best thing about (Free­man) is he’s boast­ful.”

    In writ­ing about his vot­ing for Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, Free­man said:

    “Worse is bet­ter! All those white peo­ple who aren’t on our side, need to suf­fer! They need to lose their jobs to Mex­i­cans, they need to get knock­out games, they need to not get into col­lege because they are white, they need to be dri­ven to des­per­a­tion!”

    A pic­ture under one his entries depicts the grin­ning car­i­ca­ture of a black man hold­ing a large knife with the cap­tion: “Around blacks ... nev­er relax.”

    Free­man said the pic­ture was in ref­er­ence to the preva­lence of the “knock-out game,” in which assailants attempt to ren­der a vic­tim uncon­scious with a sud­den blow to the head.

    Accord­ing to the Boston Globe, Free­man was arrest­ed on a felony cru­el­ty to ani­mal charge along with two oth­er men in 2007. The Her­ald report­ed two of the men, includ­ing Free­man, had ties to white suprema­cy groups and had tor­tured a rab­bit. The men were cleared after stat­ing they killed the rab­bit for food.

    ...

    Of course, vot­ers that skip the pri­maries and only vote in the gen­er­al elec­tion might still get a chance to vote against these kinds of can­di­dates.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 9, 2014, 5:25 pm
  3. Shock­er:

    TPM Livewire
    Report: GOP Whip Spoke At White Nation­al­ist Meet­ing In 2002

    By Dylan Scott
    Pub­lished Decem­ber 29, 2014, 4:01 PM EST

    House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise (R‑LA) spoke at a 2002 meet­ing host­ed by a white nation­al­ist group, the Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed Mon­day.

    The Post report­ed that Scalise “con­firmed through an advis­er that he once appeared at a con­ven­tion of the Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion.”

    Louisiana blog­ger Lamar White first report­ed over the week­end about Scalise’s alleged appear­ance in May 2002 in Metiarie, La. EURO, as it is know, is described by the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter as a white nation­al­ist group and “a paper tiger” to sell books and oth­er­wise pub­li­cize the work of for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana rep­re­sen­ta­tive David Duke.

    White’s report was based pri­mar­i­ly on con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous forum posts on Storm­front, a white suprema­cist web­site. Scalise was a state leg­is­la­tor at the time.

    Two top-shelf con­gres­sion­al reporters, the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Robert Cos­ta and Politi­co’s Jake Sher­man, fol­lowed up with Scalise’s office about the report.

    They got slight­ly dif­fer­ent respons­es, though Cos­ta ulti­mate­ly report­ed that Scalise had con­firmed the appear­ance.

    ...

    Yep, a total shock­er.

    You got­ta won­der what Scalise and the oth­er speak­ers might have talked about at the event.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 29, 2014, 4:25 pm
  4. The self-fla­gel­la­tion of the GOP’s House Whip is going to be inter­est­ing...

    Roll Call
    What Scalise and Vit­ter Told Roll Call About David Duke in 1999
    By Niels Lesniews­ki Post­ed at 6:55 p.m. on Dec. 29

    Back in 1999, Roll Call inter­viewed white suprema­cist leader David Duke about the pos­si­bil­i­ty he would seek the House seat vacat­ed by the res­ig­na­tion of Repub­li­can Rep. Bob Liv­ingston. As part of that report, reporter John Mer­cu­rio also talked to up-and-com­ing Louisiana politi­cians, cur­rent Sen. David Vit­ter and cur­rent House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise:

    “I hon­est­ly think his 15 min­utes of fame have come and gone,” said state Rep. David Vit­ter ®, a wealthy Metairie attor­ney who holds Duke’s old seat in the state House and is “seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing” a Con­gres­sion­al bid. “When he’s com­pet­ed in a field with real con­ser­v­a­tives, real Repub­li­cans, Duke has not done well at all.”

    Anoth­er poten­tial can­di­date, state Rep. Steve Scalise ®, said he embraces many of the same “con­ser­v­a­tive” views as Duke, but is far more viable.

    “The nov­el­ty of David Duke has worn off,” said Scalise. “The vot­ers in this dis­trict are smart enough to real­ize that they need to get behind some­one who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elect­ed. Duke has proven that he can’t get elect­ed, and that’s the first and most impor­tant thing.”

    In light of Monday’s news reports about the like­li­hood that Scalise addressed Duke’s Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion back in 2002, here is the full report from the Jan. 7, 1999, edi­tion of Roll Call:

    One of the most unlike­ly ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky scan­dal could be for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader and 1990 Sen­ate can­di­date David Duke ®.

    But the idea that Duke could suc­ceed exit­ing Rep. Bob Liv­ingston (R‑La.) in a House spe­cial elec­tion this year has sent Louisiana Repub­li­cans – who hope to hin­der Duke by sched­ul­ing that vote with the state’s guber­na­to­r­i­al and leg­isla­tive elec­tions in Octo­ber – into action.

    Par­ty lead­ers are urg­ing Gov. Mike Fos­ter ® to sched­ule the spe­cial elec­tion on Oct. 23 with a Nov. 20 runoff – the same dates oth­er major state races are slat­ed to be held. Doing so would dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase turnout for the spe­cial, and GOP cam­paign strate­gists say a high turnout would hurt Duke, whose sup­port is nar­row but high­ly moti­vat­ed to go to the polls.

    Duke – a for­mer KKK grand wiz­ard and author of white suprema­cist tracts who has already start­ed focus­ing this cam­paign on oppo­si­tion to affir­ma­tive action and immi­gra­tion – is the only major can­di­date to announce his inten­tion to run for the seat Liv­ingston plans to vacate some­time this sum­mer.

    Liv­ingston was poised to suc­ceed for­mer Speak­er Newt Gin­grich (R‑Ga.), but he announced his plans to resign

    short­ly before the House’s Dec. 19, 1998, impeach­ment vote. Days ear­li­er, Liv­ingston had acknowl­edged sev­er­al extra­mar­i­tal affairs dur­ing his tenure in the House.

    GOP lead­ers in Louisiana and on Capi­tol Hill fear Duke could under­mine their efforts to attract mod­er­ate vot­ers and minori­ties to the par­ty. He has run com­pet­i­tive­ly in two statewide races this decade.

    “I’m out­side the main­stream of the Belt­way politi­cians, but I’m well inside the main­stream of rank-and-file Repub­li­cans in this coun­try and cer­tain­ly in this dis­trict,” Duke said in an inter­view Tues­day. “The insid­ers are in a tizzy because they know I have a good shot.”

    Duke said his cam­paign will suc­ceed regard­less of how par­ty lead­ers tin­ker with the sched­ule.

    “It prob­a­bly helps me to run at the same time as the gov­er­nor because the oppo­si­tion, the good ol’ boy net­work, will be so wrapped up in their own races that they won’t have the time to fight me,” he said.

    That log­ic is not lost on Fos­ter, who has not signed onto any elec­tion sched­ule yet.

    Duke, a for­mer state Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, won 44 per­cent of the vote in his 1990 Sen­ate chal­lenge to then-Sen. Ben­nett John­ston (D) and took 39 per­cent in his 1991 guber­na­to­r­i­al race against Gov. Edwin Edwards (D), but he car­ried Livingston’s solid­ly GOP 1st dis­trict in sub­ur­ban New Orleans on both occa­sions.

    Eighty-five per­cent of the 1st district’s pop­u­la­tion is white; only 10 per­cent is black. The dis­trict is the most Repub­li­can and the most con­ser­v­a­tive in the state.

    In the 1991 guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion, Duke took about 60 per­cent in the four parish­es that com­prise the 1st dis­trict, accord­ing to the state Depart­ment of Elec­tions.

    In the 1990 Sen­ate race, he lost to John­ston, 54 to 44 per­cent, but Duke won about 54 per­cent in the 1st district’s parish­es.

    ...

    Under Louisiana’s unique elec­tion law, all House can­di­dates run on one bal­lot. If no can­di­date receives more than 50 per­cent, the top two vote- get­ters com­pete in a runoff, regard­less of par­ty affil­i­a­tion.

    “By fall, you’ll see a rush by elect­ed offi­cials unit­ing behind a strong can­di­date to make sure they don’t have to deal with some­one who wouldn’t be accept­able to Louisiana vot­ers,” said Becky Miller, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the state GOP. “Duke has some Repub­li­can prin­ci­ples, but for the most part he’s out­side the box.”

    Oth­er poten­tial Repub­li­can can­di­dates said Duke’s polit­i­cal via­bil­i­ty has waned in recent years.

    “I hon­est­ly think his 15 min­utes of fame have come and gone,” said state Rep. David Vit­ter ®, a wealthy Metairie attor­ney who holds Duke’s old seat in the state House and is “seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing” a Con­gres­sion­al bid. “When he’s com­pet­ed in a field with real con­ser­v­a­tives, real Repub­li­cans, Duke has not done well at all.”

    Anoth­er poten­tial can­di­date, state Rep. Steve Scalise ®, said he embraces many of the same “con­ser­v­a­tive” views as Duke, but is far more viable.

    “The nov­el­ty of David Duke has worn off,” said Scalise. “The vot­ers in this dis­trict are smart enough to real­ize that they need to get behind some­one who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elect­ed. Duke has proven that he can’t get elect­ed, and that’s the first and most impor­tant thing.”

    ...

    Duke said he’ll focus his cam­paign on promis­es to “out­law affir­ma­tive action pro­grams that dis­crim­i­nate against Euro­pean Amer­i­cans, shut down ille­gal immi­gra­tion and take a time out on legal immi­gra­tion.” He said he would also active­ly oppose efforts by Puer­to Rico to acquire state­hood.

    Duke, the founder and for­mer pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of White Peo­ple, has pro­voked pas­sion­ate reac­tions from every cor­ner of the polit­i­cal spec­trum since he vault­ed onto the nation­al scene in the late 1980s.

    He made head­lines when he acknowl­edged sym­pa­thiz­ing with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Ger­many, but won votes by talk­ing to con­stituents about issues more rel­e­vant to their dai­ly lives, like tax­es, wel­fare reform and racial quo­tas.

    A state leg­is­la­tor for only 18 months when he ran to chal­lenge John­ston, Duke quick­ly became a house­hold name in Louisiana. In Sep­tem­ber 1997, he was elect­ed chair­man of the St. Tam­many Repub­li­can Parish Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee – the most Repub­li­can parish in the 1st dis­trict.

    In the 1990 Sen­ate race, Duke spent $2.6 mil­lion, John­ston $5.4 mil­lion.

    At a time when politi­cians are increas­ing­ly open to ques­tions about their per­son­al lives, Duke, who has been divorced for 20 years, is also seek­ing to assure Repub­li­can vot­ers that he would not suf­fer the same fate as Liv­ingston.

    “I’m the only can­di­date who doesn’t have to wor­ry about skele­tons in my clos­et. I don’t have a clos­et any­more,” he said. “No one has been more inves­ti­gat­ed polit­i­cal­ly in this state. I’m scan­dal-proof.”

    “The nov­el­ty of David Duke has worn off,” said Scalise. “The vot­ers in this dis­trict are smart enough to real­ize that they need to get behind some­one who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elect­ed. Duke has proven that he can’t get elect­ed, and that’s the first and most impor­tant thing.”

    So the GOP’s House Whip is like an elec­table David Duke, who was just a nov­el­ty. Noth­ing nov­el about that!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 29, 2014, 5:11 pm
  5. “If Scalise is going to be cru­ci­fied — if Repub­li­cans want to throw Steve Scalise to the woods, then a lot of them bet­ter be look­ing over their shoul­ders,” Duke told Fusion:

    TPM Livewire
    David Duke: I’ve Met With Steve Scalise Sev­er­al Times, So What?

    By Ahiza Gar­cia
    Pub­lished Decem­ber 30, 2014, 4:32 PM EST

    For­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said in an inter­view with Fusion on Mon­day that not only did House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise (R‑LA) speak at a 2002 meet­ing of a group he led, but that the two of them also met on sev­er­al occa­sions.

    Duke’s com­ments came as Scalise is deal­ing with the fall­out of rev­e­la­tions that he spoke to the white nation­al­ist group and that, in 1999, he report­ed­ly said he agreed with Duke on “con­ser­v­a­tive” issues but ques­tioned the ex-KKK lead­er’s elec­tabil­i­ty to Con­gress.

    “Why is Scalise being sin­gled out? I don’t know,” Duke told Fusion about the 2002 meet­ing. “He was just going there, obvi­ous­ly, to tell vot­ers about some of his ini­tia­tives on some tax mat­ters. That’s what it’s all about. And I think it’s insane, this whole process.”

    Duke’s com­ments came with a warn­ing to Repub­li­cans who might be quick to dis­tance them­selves from Scalise.

    “If Scalise is going to be cru­ci­fied — if Repub­li­cans want to throw Steve Scalise to the woods, then a lot of them bet­ter be look­ing over their shoul­ders,” Duke told Fusion. He added that he was­n’t afraid to release a list of names of politi­cians he has con­nec­tions to.

    Duke also dis­put­ed accu­sa­tions that he was a “racist” or “white suprema­cist,” say­ing the polit­i­cal scorn being direct­ed at him was “all bull­shit.”

    Both Scalise and Duke served in Louisiana’s House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Duke held office from 1989–1992, with mul­ti­ple unsuc­cess­ful bids in the late 90s, and Scalise served from 1996–2008.

    ...

    Uh oh.

    Also, uh oh:

    New York Times
    Boehn­er Stands By Scalise in Furor Over Racist Group

    By JACKIE CALMES and JONATHAN MARTINDEC. 30, 2014

    WASHINGTON — Speak­er John A. Boehn­er on Tues­day expressed “full con­fi­dence” in Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 Repub­li­can leader in the House, as he sought to quell a racial­ly charged con­tro­ver­sy shak­ing the par­ty after Mr. Scalise con­firmed that he had addressed a white suprema­cist group a dozen years ago.

    Mr. Boehner’s state­ment of sup­port was his first pub­lic com­ment since the news broke on Mon­day night, a peri­od filled with calls from some Repub­li­can and con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors, as well as Democ­rats, for Repub­li­can lead­ers to shove Mr. Scalise from the lead­er­ship post. The flap roiled Repub­li­cans just as they were poised for a cel­e­bra­to­ry takeover of Con­gress when the new ses­sion opens next week.

    “More than a decade ago, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Scalise made an error in judg­ment, and he was right to acknowl­edge it was wrong and inap­pro­pri­ate,” Mr. Boehn­er said. “Like many of my col­leagues on both sides of the aisle, I know Steve to be a man of high integri­ty and good char­ac­ter. He has my full con­fi­dence as our Whip, and he will con­tin­ue to do great and impor­tant work for all Amer­i­cans.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 30, 2014, 2:40 pm
  6. With the GOP now fac­ing anoth­er “we’re not the the big­ot par­ty!” moment, it’s worth ask­ing “What would Rand Do?

    The answer: Most­ly just deny every­thing. And the band plays on:

    The New York Times
    Rand Paul’s Mixed Inher­i­tance

    By SAM TANENHAUS and JIM RUTENBERGJAN. 25, 2014

    The lib­er­tar­i­an faith­ful — anti­tax activists and war pro­test­ers, John Birch Soci­ety mem­bers and a smat­ter­ing of “truthers” who sus­pect the government’s hand in the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks — gath­ered last Sep­tem­ber, eager to see the ris­ing star of their move­ment.

    With top billing on the open­ing night of the Lib­er­ty Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence, Sen­a­tor Rand Paul of Ken­tucky told the audi­ence at a Mar­riott in Vir­ginia that a viable Repub­li­can Par­ty must reach out to young peo­ple and minori­ties.

    But not long after the applause died down, Mr. Paul was out the door. He skipped an address by his father, for­mer Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ron Paul, as well as clos­ing remarks by his own for­mer Sen­ate aide, an ex-radio host who had once cel­e­brat­ed Abra­ham Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion and extolled white pride.

    The sen­a­tor was off to an exclu­sive resort on Mack­inac Island, Mich., where he again talked about the future of the par­ty. But this time he was in the com­pa­ny of Karl Rove and oth­er pow­er bro­kers, and his audi­ence was of Repub­li­can stal­warts who were siz­ing up pos­si­ble pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates.

    As Rand Paul test-mar­kets a pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy and tries to broad­en his appeal, he is also try­ing to take lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, an ide­ol­o­gy long on the fringes of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, into the main­stream. Mid­way through his fresh­man term, he has become a promi­nent voice in Washington’s biggest debates — on gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, spend­ing and Mid­dle East pol­i­cy.

    In the months since he com­mand­ed nation­al atten­tion and bipar­ti­san praise for his 13-hour fil­i­buster against the Oba­ma administration’s drone strike pro­gram, Mr. Paul has impressed Repub­li­can lead­ers with his stay­ing pow­er, in part because of the stum­bles of poten­tial rivals and despite some of his own.

    “Sen­a­tor Paul is a cred­i­ble nation­al can­di­date,” said Mitt Rom­ney, who ran for pres­i­dent as the con­sum­mate insid­er in 2012. “He has tapped into the grow­ing sen­ti­ment that gov­ern­ment has become too large and too intru­sive.” In an email, Mr. Rom­ney added that the votes and dol­lars Mr. Paul would attract from his father’s sup­port­ers could help make him “a seri­ous con­tender for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion.”

    But if Mr. Paul reaps the ben­e­fits of his father’s name and his­to­ry, he also must con­tend with the bur­dens of that pat­ri­mo­ny. And as he has become a politi­cian in his own right and now tours the cir­cuit of ear­ly pri­ma­ry states, Mr. Paul has been cal­i­brat­ing how ful­ly he embraces some lib­er­tar­i­an pre­cepts.

    “I want to be judged by who I am, not by a rela­tion­ship,” Mr. Paul, a self-described lib­er­tar­i­an Repub­li­can, said in an inter­view last week. “I have want­ed to devel­op my own way, and my own, I guess, con­nec­tions to oth­er intel­lec­tu­al move­ments myself when I came to Wash­ing­ton.”

    Com­ing of age in America’s first fam­i­ly of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism — he calls his father, a three-time pres­i­den­tial aspi­rant, “my hero” — Rand Paul was steeped in a nar­row, right­ward strain of the ide­ol­o­gy, accord­ing to inter­views, doc­u­ments, and a review of speech­es, arti­cles and books.

    Some of its adher­ents have for­mu­lat­ed provoca­tive the­o­ries on race, class and Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and rou­tine­ly voice beliefs that go far beyond the anti­war, anti-big-gov­ern­ment, pro-civ­il-lib­er­ties mes­sage of the broad­er move­ment that has attract­ed legions of col­lege stu­dents, Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neurs and Tea Par­ty activists.

    That world­view, often called “pale­olib­er­tar­i­an­ism,” emerges from the Lud­wig von Mis­es Insti­tute in Alaba­ma, start­ed with mon­ey raised by the senior Mr. Paul. It is named for the Aus­tri­an émi­gré who became an intel­lec­tu­al god­fa­ther of mod­ern lib­er­tar­i­an eco­nom­ic think­ing, devot­ed to an unre­strict­ed free mar­ket.

    Some schol­ars affil­i­at­ed with the Mis­es Insti­tute have com­bined dark bib­li­cal prophe­cy with apoc­a­lyp­tic warn­ings that the nation is plung­ing toward eco­nom­ic col­lapse and cul­tur­al ruin. Oth­ers have cham­pi­oned the Con­fed­er­a­cy. One econ­o­mist, while fault­ing slav­ery because it was invol­un­tary, sug­gest­ed in an inter­view that the dai­ly life of the enslaved was “not so bad — you pick cot­ton and sing songs.”

    Mr. Paul says he abhors racism, has nev­er vis­it­ed the insti­tute and should not have to answer for the more extreme views of all of those in the lib­er­tar­i­an orbit.

    “If you were to say to some­one, ‘Well, you’re a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can or you are a Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can, does that mean that you think when the earth­quake hap­pened in Haiti that was God’s pun­ish­ment for homo­sex­u­al­i­ty?’ Well, no,” he said in an ear­li­er inter­view. “It los­es its sense of pro­por­tion if you have to go through and defend every sin­gle per­son about whom some­one says is asso­ci­at­ed with you.”

    Still, his 2011 book, “The Tea Par­ty Goes to Wash­ing­ton,” prais­es some insti­tute schol­ars, rec­om­mend­ing their work and the insti­tute web­site.

    And he has some­times touched on themes far from the main­stream. He has cau­tioned in the past of a plan to cre­ate a North Amer­i­can Union with a sin­gle cur­ren­cy for the Unit­ed States, Mex­i­co and Cana­da, and a stealth Unit­ed Nations cam­paign to con­fis­cate civil­ian hand­guns. He has repeat­ed­ly referred to the “tyran­ny” of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

    Since becom­ing a nation­al fig­ure, Mr. Paul has gen­er­al­ly stayed on safer ground. His denun­ci­a­tions of gov­ern­ment intru­sion on Amer­i­cans’ pri­va­cy have been joined by law­mak­ers in both par­ties and have res­onat­ed with the pub­lic — though no oth­er mem­ber of Con­gress as yet has joined him in his planned class-action suit against the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency.

    ...

    As a rook­ie sen­a­tor, Mr. Paul ini­tial­ly was per­ceived as an irri­tant, his goal not to leg­is­late but to dis­rupt.

    He pro­posed cut­ting the fed­er­al bud­get by five times as much as par­ty lead­ers. He near­ly caused the Patri­ot Act to expire by aggres­sive­ly seek­ing changes before its reau­tho­riza­tion. And he tus­sled over deten­tion pol­i­cy with Sen­a­tor John McCain of Ari­zona, who would lat­er label Mr. Paul and like-mind­ed Repub­li­cans, includ­ing Sen­a­tor Cruz, “wacko birds.”

    But Mr. Paul had already begun a sub­tle makeover. His sec­ond book, “Gov­ern­ment Bul­lies,” pub­lished in 2012, does not men­tion the Mis­es Insti­tute or its affil­i­at­ed schol­ars. (The book proved embar­rass­ing last fall when jour­nal­ists dis­cov­ered that it includ­ed pla­gia­rized mate­r­i­al, which Mr. Paul attrib­uted to slop­pi­ness.) He empha­sized his sup­port for Israel with a vis­it there last year and told a black audi­ence that he had “nev­er wavered” in sup­port for the Civ­il Rights Act.

    These shifts have alarmed some fol­low­ers, as has Mr. Paul’s increas­ing­ly cor­dial rela­tion­ship with Sen­a­tor McConnell, whom he once depict­ed as the embod­i­ment of the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment.

    ...

    “Some schol­ars affil­i­at­ed with the Mis­es Insti­tute have com­bined dark bib­li­cal prophe­cy with apoc­a­lyp­tic warn­ings that the nation is plung­ing toward eco­nom­ic col­lapse and cul­tur­al ruin.” Dark bib­li­cal prophe­cies from Mis­es Insti­tute affil­i­ates. LOL (check out pages 418–419)

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 30, 2014, 5:10 pm
  7. It was all so much eas­i­er when the GOP could pre­tend it does­n’t have a his­to­ry of court­ing the white suprema­cist vote. Now it’s just awk­ward to see the GOP hav­ing to pre­tend­ing that it total­ly court­ed that vote by acci­dent. Awk­ward and painful. For every­one:

    The Dai­ly Beast
    Racists Melt Down Over Steve Scalise
    White suprema­cists online whine that the Repub­li­can leader address­ing one of their groups is no dif­fer­ent than talk­ing to the NAACP.

    12.30.14

    The scan­dal swirling around Steve Scalise’s address to white suprema­cists has white suprema­cists cry­ing foul.

    Steve Scalise, new­ly elect­ed as Repub­li­can major­i­ty whip, admit­ted to address the Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion con­fer­ence in 2002 when he was a Louisiana law­mak­er. (EURO was found­ed by David Duke, the ex-Klans­man who ran for Louisiana gov­er­nor in 1991.) Scalise says he didn’t know they were a white suprema­cist group and equat­ed address­ing them with “lib­er­al” groups like the League of Women vot­ers.

    Stormfront.org, the lead­ing white-hate site on the Inter­net, agrees with Scalise’s defense. Storm­front founder and for­mer KKK leader Don Black wrote he can’t stand the “absolute hypocrisy of the anti-White estab­lish­ment.”

    ...

    The Storm­front folks say the forum isn’t about white Chris­t­ian suprema­cy, but rights for whites, despite post­ing how African Amer­i­cans have “IQs in the range of 80–85” and claim­ing the “jew­s­me­dia” active­ly “ignores black on white crime.”

    “We are not white suprema­cist,” insists Pop­per 504. “We want to live with our own, far­thest away from the blacks and jews.”

    ...

    The Storm­front crowd offers its own help­ful polit­i­cal advice, not only for Scalise but also for the entire GOP.

    “If Repub­li­cans tru­ly want­ed to take this coun­try back, they would make use of the major­i­ty of peo­ple in this coun­try — Whites — and mobi­lize,” posts a user named Cyan Sky. “The Dems play iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics with non-whites. The only way the Repub­li­cans will win is if they do the same with Whites.”

    “If Repub­li­cans tru­ly want­ed to take this coun­try back, they would make use of the major­i­ty of peo­ple in this coun­try — Whites — and mobilize...The Dems play iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics with non-whites. The only way the Repub­li­cans will win is if they do the same with Whites.” Bwah! Ha! Ha! That was a good one. The part of Scalise com­par­ing the white suprema­cists to the League of Women vot­ers was pret­ty hilar­i­ous too.

    And the hits keep com­ing:

    TPM DC
    Why House Repub­li­cans Aren’t Dump­ing Scalise Despite White Suprema­cist Flap
    By Sahil Kapur
    Pub­lished Decem­ber 31, 2014, 2:22 PM EST

    Repub­li­cans have no inten­tion of dump­ing House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise (R‑LA) from his pow­er­ful lead­er­ship posi­tion despite the con­gress­man­’s admis­sion that he spoke to a gath­er­ing of white nation­al­ists in 2002.

    On Tues­day, the day after the issue erupt­ed, Scalise said his deci­sion was “a mis­take I regret, and I emphat­i­cal­ly oppose the divi­sive racial and reli­gious views groups like these hold.” With­in an hour, House Speak­er John Boehn­er (R‑OH) and House Major­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑CA) blast­ed out state­ments sup­port­ing their recent­ly-installed No. 3.

    Scalise was elect­ed to lead­er­ship in July for two key rea­sons. First, many Repub­li­cans want­ed a south­ern­er in the ranks — before him, every leader hailed from a state won twice by Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. Sec­ond, after for­mer House Major­i­ty Leader Eric Can­tor’s stun­ning pri­ma­ry defeat in June, Repub­li­can lead­ers want­ed an effec­tive liai­son to their restive right flank.

    On both counts, the Scalise exper­i­ment has been a suc­cess, GOP sources said. Con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers feel they have more input in the leg­isla­tive process under Scalise, who often vot­ed with the par­ty’s right wing. Boehn­er has watched Scalise whip up the votes to pass two key pieces of leg­is­la­tion despite long odds: the August mes­sag­ing bill to boost bor­der secu­ri­ty fund­ing, and the Decem­ber bill to fund most of the gov­ern­ment through the end of the fis­cal year. Vote count­ing was not a strong suit for the pre­vi­ous GOP lead­er­ship team. Oth­er prob­lems with the ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive wing could return or get worse if they forced Scalise out.

    ...

    House Repub­li­cans across the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum are stand­ing by Scalise, sig­nal­ing a lack of an appetite to ditch him — at least, that is, unless new rev­e­la­tions make the sit­u­a­tion even worse and force them to recon­sid­er.

    “Based on what we know so far, he should stay on,” Rep. Peter King (R‑NY), a Boehn­er ally who is often at odds with the right flank, said Wednes­day on MSNBC. “He has proven him­self to be a hard­work­ing mem­ber of Con­gress, reach­es out, works with every­one. There’s always rumors about this per­son, that per­son in Con­gress. I’ve nev­er heard any­thing bad about Steve Scalise until the sto­ry broke the oth­er day and he’s giv­ing us his expla­na­tion. I believe we owe him the ben­e­fit of the doubt on this unless more comes out.”

    Above all, Boehn­er and his fel­low Repub­li­cans want the sto­ry to blow over. It’s not the start they want­ed to the 114th Con­gress, and they have noth­ing to gain by dis­cussing it. Crit­i­ciz­ing Scalise could offend the GOP base, and any praise has to be cau­tious giv­en the nature of the con­tro­ver­sy.

    The prob­lem is unlike­ly to hurt Scalise back at home. His south­ern Louisiana dis­trict is the most con­ser­v­a­tive dis­trict in the state, and the 10th most Repub­li­can dis­trict in the entire House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, lean­ing GOP by a whop­ping 26 points, accord­ing to the Cook Polit­i­cal Report’s par­ti­san vot­er index.

    ...

    “Above all, Boehn­er and his fel­low Repub­li­cans want the sto­ry to blow over. It’s not the start they want­ed to the 114th Con­gress, and they have noth­ing to gain by dis­cussing it. Crit­i­ciz­ing Scalise could offend the GOP base, and any praise has to be cau­tious giv­en the nature of the con­tro­ver­sy.”

    That does seem to sum­ma­rize the sit­u­a­tion well. At least the old sit­u­a­tion. It turns out there’s a new sit­u­a­tion:
    Scalise did­n’t go to the EURO con­fer­ence at all. He mere­ly attend­ed a dif­fer­ent neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tion meet­ing that hap­pened to be at the same hotel on the same day and that hap­pened to be orga­nized by the same David Duke asso­ciate, Ken­ny Knight, that booked the room for the EURO con­fer­ence. Also, Ken­ny Knight had noth­ing else to do with the EURO con­fer­ence. He just booked the room as a favor for David Duke while Duke was away in Rus­sia. Yep, that’s total­ly what hap­pened:

    Slate
    White Noise
    Did House Major­i­ty Whip Steve Scalise admit to speak­ing at a white suprema­cist event he nev­er attend­ed?
    By Bet­sy Woodruff
    Dec. 30 2014 6:49 PM

    Rep. Steve Scalise may have just inept­ly admit­ted to speak­ing at a white suprema­cist event that eye­wit­ness­es say he nev­er attend­ed. Two event atten­dees say it’s fac­tu­al­ly inac­cu­rate to char­ac­ter­ize Scalise’s com­ments as direct­ed at the suprema­cist gathering—even though Scalise’s own office has said the House major­i­ty whip spoke to the group 12 years ago.

    Ken­ny Knight is a long­time asso­ciate of David Duke, the for­mer Grand Wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan who ran for gov­er­nor of Louisiana in 1991. He’s been a key play­er in news that broke on Sun­day that indi­cat­ed Scalise addressed the white suprema­cist con­ven­tion of the Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion when he was a Louisiana state rep­re­sen­ta­tive in May 2002.

    Knight said on Tues­day that it’s “total­ly incor­rect” to say Scalise spoke at that con­ven­tion.

    “He spoke ear­ly in the day to a con­tin­gent of peo­ple, pri­or to the con­fer­ence kick­ing off,” Knight said. “He was not there as a guest speak­er at the con­fer­ence.”

    Accord­ing to Knight, he and Scalise were neigh­bors in 2002, liv­ing in the Old Jef­fer­son neigh­bor­hood out­side New Orleans. They were friend­ly and lived with­in a few blocks of each oth­er. Knight recalls that Scalise would beep the horn and wave at him if he drove by in his car.

    “Now and then I’d see him at a Repub­li­can func­tion, we’d say hel­lo, but we nev­er exchanged any phi­los­o­phy ideas,” Knight said.

    Knight has known and pub­licly sup­port­ed Duke for decades. He agreed to help Duke set up some of the logis­tics for the 2002 EURO con­ven­tion, espe­cial­ly since the for­mer KKK leader was in Rus­sia at the time of the event. You can read more about EURO’s back­ground here at the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter. It’s ugly stuff—anti-Semitic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, con­cerns about “the ‘brown­ing’ of Amer­i­ca,” Nazi apologia—but Knight insists the orga­ni­za­tion isn’t a white suprema­cist group.

    Regard­less, Knight said that he wasn’t involved in plan­ning the event’s itin­er­ary or pick­ing its speak­ers but that he did book space for it in the Land­mark Best West­ern Hotel in Metairie, Louisiana. Besides book­ing the venue, Knight said he also set up refresh­ments for atten­dees, arranged for them to eat at a local restau­rant, and orga­nized a haunt­ed house tour of the French Quar­ter after the con­fer­ence.

    “I, sim­ply as a cour­tesy to Mr. Duke, rent­ed the room and set it up to give them a loca­tion,” he said. “I wasn’t real­ly involved with the actu­al con­fer­ence itself.”

    It’s impor­tant to bear in mind that Knight isn’t crit­i­cal of the con­fer­ence, which puts him in a very small cat­e­go­ry.

    “EURO was not a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion,” he said. “The peo­ple that came were mid­dle-aged, tax­pay­ing, God-fear­ing, Chris­t­ian peo­ple.”

    Accord­ing to Knight, the EURO con­fer­ence was slat­ed to start in the ear­ly after­noon, rough­ly around 1 p.m. But his reser­va­tion at the hotel gave him access to the con­fer­ence space for a few hours before the event’s offi­cial kick­off. At the time, Knight head­ed the Jef­fer­son Heights Civic Asso­ci­a­tion, which was large­ly com­prised of elder­ly peo­ple who lived in his and Scalise’s neigh­bor­hood.

    Knight said he set up a morn­ing event for his own civic asso­ci­a­tion in the hotel space before the EURO con­fer­ence start­ed. Though that event was in the conference’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty room, it wasn’t at all relat­ed to the EURO event, he said.

    “It was my room to do what I want with it,” he said.

    ...

    Knight said that when he invit­ed Scalise to speak to the civic asso­ci­a­tion, he nev­er men­tioned that it would be held in the same room the EURO con­fer­ence would lat­er use or that some con­fer­ence atten­dees may be present.

    Bar­bara Noble, Knight’s then-girl­friend who was also present at the hotel event and who I spoke with sep­a­rate­ly, cor­rob­o­rat­ed Knight’s account.

    “[Scalise] was just up there for a few min­utes, maybe 10, 15 at the most, and it was in the morn­ing,” she said.

    ...

    Besides Knight and Noble, the only event atten­dees who have spo­ken pub­licly about the meet­ing are Scalise himself—who told the Times-Picayune that he doesn’t remem­ber it—and a white nation­al­ist Storm­Front mes­sage board com­menter who wrote under the user­name “Alsace Hebert” and whose account now appears to be defunct.

    How­ev­er, on Mon­day, an advis­er for the House major­i­ty whip told the Wash­ing­ton Post that Scalise “appeared at a con­ven­tion of the Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion, or EURO.”

    Knight and Noble are adamant that the Jef­fer­son Heights Civic Asso­ci­a­tion event and the EURO con­ven­tion were clear­ly dis­tinct events. When asked if he had invit­ed Scalise to attend the EURO con­fer­ence, Knight replied, “That is not what hap­pened. I’ll take a lie-detec­tor test. That is not what hap­pened.”

    When asked Tues­day after­noon, a spokes­woman for Scalise didn’t com­ment on Knight and Noble’s ver­sion of the events.

    There’s total con­sen­sus on the right and left that Scalise dis­played mis­er­able judg­ment by asso­ci­at­ing him­self with Knight, an ally of the for­mer KKK leader. But Knight’s and Noble’s accounts cast doubt on an emerg­ing nar­ra­tive: that, as Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gres­sion­al Cam­paign Com­mit­tee spokesman Josh Schw­erin told Politi­co, the Louisiana Repub­li­can “chose to cheer­lead for a group of KKK mem­bers and neo-Nazis at a white suprema­cist ral­ly.” If Knight and Noble are right, then the truth is much less the­atri­cal than some make it sound.

    Woah! Well that’s quite an expla­na­tion from mutu­al Duke/Scalise asso­ciate Ken­ny Knight: he was mere­ly neigh­bors with Scalise, and “now and then I’d see him at a Repub­li­can func­tion, we’d say hel­lo, but we nev­er exchanged any phi­los­o­phy ideas.” Pre­sum­ably Knight nev­er “exchanged any phi­los­o­phy ideas” with the oth­er folks at these Repub­li­can func­tions, because that would be scanalous.

    Any­ways, so Knight was­n’t real­ly involved with the EURO con­fer­ence at all....except for book­ing the room as a favor for Duke. But he did­n’t real­ly attend it. No, he was only involved with the Jef­fer­son Heights Civic Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence that took place at the same hotel just a few hours ear­li­er and that was the con­fer­ence Scalise spoke at. Not the EURO con­fer­ence.

    Well that set­tles that! It was all a big mis­un­der­stand­ing. Uh huh:

    Think Progress
    Ali­bi For Con­gress­man Who Spoke To White Suprema­cist Group Com­plete­ly Falls Apart

    by Judd Legum Post­ed on Jan­u­ary 1, 2015 at 9:52 pm

    Con­gress­man Steve Scalise apol­o­gized ear­li­er this week for speak­ing to a group of white suprema­cists in 2002. You would think that would set­tle the ques­tion of whether Scalise spoke to a group of white suprema­cists.

    But no.

    Two days ago, Slate ran a piece quot­ing Ken­ny Knight, a close asso­ciate of David Duke, who booked the room for the white suprema­cist group, known as EURO. Knight claimed that he invit­ed Scalise to speak to the “Jef­fer­son Heights Civic Asso­ci­a­tion, which was large­ly com­prised of elder­ly peo­ple who lived in his and Scalise’s neigh­bor­hood.” The meet­ing of the civic asso­ci­a­tion, Knight said, just hap­pened to be held in the same room as the EURO con­fer­ence held lat­er that day. Knight told The Times-Picayune that he “was not a mem­ber of EURO and did not arrange for any speak­ers at the 2002 con­fer­ence

    The right-wing ran was the sto­ry, billing the entire con­tro­ver­sy as lit­tle more than a hoax.

    ...

    But, as it turns out, Knight was lying. Not only was Knight a mem­ber of the EURO group but “doc­u­ments filed with the Louisiana sec­re­tary of state’s office list him as trea­sur­er…” He is also list­ed as a mem­ber of the group in a 2002 news release for the con­fer­ence in ques­tion, where he was sched­uled as a speak­er.

    Asked about the dis­crep­an­cy and the state doc­u­ment list­ing him as trea­sur­er of the group, Knight hung up twice on a reporter for The Times-Picayune. Even­tu­al­ly, Knight said “Is that 15 years ago? I don’t even remem­ber that. I’m not com­mu­ni­cat­ing any more with the news media. I’m fin­ished with y’all.”

    If you have any fur­ther ques­tions, ask David Duke. In an inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Post, Duke said he “recalled Knight reach­ing out to Scalise in the weeks before the con­fer­ence to come and update atten­dees on state affairs, and that Scalise accept­ed with­out reser­va­tion.”

    Ah. Well, it sure looks like Scalise’s ali­bi turned out to be a lie and he real­ly did attend the EURO con­fer­ence. Oh well. It’s kind of moot at this point.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 2, 2015, 12:06 am
  8. David Duke once again threat­ened to ‘name names’ of politi­cians who con­tin­ue to attack Steve Scalise which means that David Duke is now suc­cess­ful­ly pub­licly black­mail­ing politi­cians using his own polit­i­cal taint as the WMD. And why not? He’s prob­a­bly got a lot of names to name, after all.

    So we should prob­a­bly expect see the GOP con­tin­u­ing to stand by Scalise while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly denounc­ing Duke. But, of course, that may not be good enough, because the white suprema­cists not only want to see the attacks on Scalise end. They want to see the attacks on their white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy end too. So the GOP has to defend Scalise while not attack the white suprema­cists too much. And there’s not real­ly any­thing the GOP can do oth­er than con­tin­ue its weird polit­i­cal squirm­ing.

    Squirm baby squirm

    NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
    White suprema­cist ban­ners, racist talks at lat­er events of group Steve Scalise pre­vi­ous­ly addressed, civ­il rights group says

    By Mark Schleif­stein
    on Decem­ber 30, 2014 at 7:01 PM, updat­ed Decem­ber 30, 2014 at 7:06 PM

    Ban­ners pro­claim­ing “White Pow­er” and “White Pride World­wide” plas­tered the walls, and speak­ers gave racist speech­es at lat­er con­fer­ences in Ken­ner of a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion that U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise says he had addressed in Metairie in 2002, an inves­ti­ga­tor with the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter civ­il rights group said Tues­day.

    The law cen­ter did­n’t have an inves­ti­ga­tor at the 2002 con­fer­ence of the Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion at which Scalise has acknowl­edged that he spoke. But Hei­di Beirich, direc­tor of the cen­ter’s “Intel­li­gence Project,” said EURO events she attend­ed in 2004 and 2005 in Ken­ner left no doubt about the group’s racist agen­da.

    “The con­fer­ences were a full day of peo­ple giv­ing speech­es rep­re­sent­ing the worst in racism or anti-Semi­tism,” said Beirich.

    For­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke found­ed EURO, a con­nec­tion the law cen­ter said should have made it clear the group’s racist agen­da. The nature of the events EURO put togeth­er left no doutb, Beirich said.

    At one of the con­fer­ences she attend­ed in Ken­ner, a fea­tured speak­er “spoke about how evil Mus­lims are,” Beirich said. “He described a Mus­lim woman as a ‘hag in a bag.’ ”

    Oth­er speak­ers at the 2004 and 2005 con­fer­ences gave talks deny­ing that World War II’s Holo­caust — the exter­mi­na­tion by Nazis of mil­lions of Jews and oth­ers in con­cen­tra­tion camps and mas­sacres — actu­al­ly occurred. Oth­er speak­ers told audi­ences that Jews and non-whites were tak­ing con­trol of the Unit­ed States.

    “It was almost held like an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence, but the top­ics were so hor­rif­ic that it’s shock­ing,” Beirich said.

    Beirich said she did not attend the May 2002 con­fer­ence at which Scalise spoke and has no infor­ma­tion on what talks were giv­en or whether sim­i­lar ban­ners were used.

    The Mont­gomery, Ala.-based cen­ter on Tues­day called on Scalise to step down as house major­i­ty whip because of his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 2002 con­fer­ence, and ques­tioned Scalise’s insis­tence that he did not know EURO was a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion.

    In a Tues­day state­ment, Scalise said his deci­sion to appear at the con­fer­ence to talk about state tax­a­tion issues was a mis­take.

    “One of the many groups that I spoke to regard­ing this crit­i­cal leg­is­la­tion was a group whose views I whole­heart­ed­ly con­demn,” Scalise said in a state­ment. “It was a mis­take I regret, and I emphat­i­cal­ly oppose the divi­sive racial and reli­gious views groups like these hold.”

    But offi­cials with the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter argue that it would be dif­fi­cult for Scalise not to know the kind of group he was address­ing, espe­cial­ly since The Gam­bit report­ed ahead of the 2002 con­fer­ence on an announce­ment by the Iowa Cubs minor league base­ball team that they were can­celling their stay at the Metairie hotel where the EURO con­fer­ence was being held. The Gam­bit also report­ed on a state­ment by the hotel, then called the Best West­ern Land­mark, say­ing it did not sup­port the con­fer­ence but was con­trac­tu­al­ly oblig­at­ed to host it.

    The Gam­bit’s arti­cle said EURO offi­cials decid­ed to close the con­fer­ence to the pub­lic and require those attend­ing to be EURO mem­bers or local orga­niz­ers and pay a fee after the hotel con­tro­ver­sy sparked rumors that pro­test­ers might show up.

    “I think it is sim­ply not cred­i­ble that Steve Scalise, a Louisiana-based politi­cian with nation­al aspi­ra­tions, could not have known at that time who David Duke was and what EURO was,” said Mark Potok, a senior fel­low at the law cen­ter and edi­tor of its Intel­li­gence Report inves­tiga­tive jour­nal.

    “There was an immense amount of pub­lic­i­ty, and espe­cial­ly in Louisiana. David Duke then and today was the most noto­ri­ous white suprema­cist in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca,” he said.

    Potok also was crit­i­cal of the Repub­li­can Par­ty for back­ing Scalise to remain as Major­i­ty Whip when Con­gress re-con­venes on Jan. 6.

    “The Repub­li­can Par­ty has made a lot of noise recent­ly about reach­ing out to minori­ties in this coun­try,” he said. “It’s very hard to under­stand how the par­ty is going to do that when it turns out that one of their most impor­tant lead­ers has been giv­ing speech­es to an open­ly white suprema­cist group.”

    ...

    “The Repub­li­can Par­ty has made a lot of noise recent­ly about reach­ing out to minori­ties in this country...It’s very hard to under­stand how the par­ty is going to do that when it turns out that one of their most impor­tant lead­ers has been giv­ing speech­es to an open­ly white suprema­cist group.”

    This sounds like a job for bold par­ty lead­er­ship. Have fun with that.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 3, 2015, 6:35 pm
  9. It looks like Steve Scalise might final­ly be on the way out as House Major­i­ty Whip now that the Scalise/Duke scan­dal has final­ly start­ed threat­en­ing what mat­ters most to the GOP: its mon­ey:

    Politi­co
    Steve Scalise: Dam­aged goods?

    The major­i­ty whip may be tox­ic in some GOP cir­cles.

    By John Bres­na­han and Jake Sher­man

    1/5/15 7:31 PM EST

    The scan­dal over Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise’s 2002 speech to a white suprema­cist group has so bad­ly dam­aged his image inside the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence that he faces seri­ous ques­tions over his polit­i­cal future, accord­ing to inter­views with mul­ti­ple aides and law­mak­ers — includ­ing some Scalise allies.

    Scalise’s job as House major­i­ty whip remains safe – and Speak­er John Boehn­er has pub­licly backed him — but he may be too tox­ic for some Repub­li­can cir­cles. Top GOP aides and law­mak­ers ques­tion whether he’ll be able to raise funds, espe­cial­ly on trips to New York or Los Ange­les. Senior fig­ures with­in the par­ty doubt that the cor­po­rate chief­tains and rich donors who bankroll Repub­li­can can­di­dates will give him mon­ey to keep cam­paign cof­fers filled. Oth­ers say it will be dif­fi­cult for him to per­suade law­mak­ers to sup­port the House Repub­li­can agen­da.

    Rank-and-file GOP law­mak­ers, mean­while, found them­selves defend­ing Scalise back home, a poten­tial­ly fatal flaw for some­one who wants to serve in lead­er­ship. Many of these law­mak­ers are faced with blis­ter­ing edi­to­ri­als from home­town news­pa­pers call­ing for Scalise to step down. Con­ser­v­a­tive activists like Mark Levin, Erick Erick­son and Sarah Palin have all said he should be boot­ed out of GOP lead­er­ship.

    “As far as him going up to the North­east, or going out to Los Ange­les or San Fran­cis­co or Chica­go, he’s dam­aged,” said a GOP law­mak­er who asked not to be named. “This thing is still smok­ing. Nobody is real­ly fan­ning the flames yet. … The thing that con­cerns me is that there are peo­ple who are still out there dig­ging on this right now.”

    Democ­rats, for their part, are work­ing to craft a sus­tained attack against the Louisiana Repub­li­can, using Scalise’s con­tin­ued role in the lead­er­ship to launch broad­sides against dozens of rank-and-file GOP law­mak­ers.

    “If Repub­li­cans want to keep a white suprema­cist sym­pa­thiz­er as a top leader and the per­son in charge of telling their Mem­bers how to vote, they will pay the price,” said Jesse Fer­gu­son, a top aide at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gres­sion­al Cam­paign Com­mit­tee. “Repub­li­can donors won’t want to be seen with him and vul­ner­a­ble Repub­li­can mem­bers can’t afford to be asso­ci­at­ed with his agen­da.”

    ...

    “Steve has deep and mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships in the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence, and with a num­ber of Democ­rats in the House,” said Rep. Patrick McHen­ry (R‑N.C.), the chief deputy major­i­ty whip and a Scalise con­fi­dant. “Over the course of his term, he’s going to show what he’s shown in the last six months of being whip — that he’s effec­tive.”

    McHen­ry added: “Some­thing that hap­pened over a dozen years ago doesn’t affect people’s rela­tion­ships with [Scalise] now, nor should it.”

    Yet with the Scalise camp large­ly qui­et, his crit­ics — both pub­lic and pri­vate — have begun to rail against the Louisiana Repub­li­can, demand­ing to know how long he can remain in his post.

    “There is con­cern that the sit­u­a­tion will make it more dif­fi­cult for him to raise mon­ey,” said a GOP lead­er­ship aide, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. “It will be dif­fi­cult to raise mon­ey from major Repub­li­can donors. And it remains to be seen what sort of role he can play in terms of help­ing incum­bents in tough dis­tricts.”

    A Repub­li­can fundrais­er added, “I think it def­i­nite­ly makes it a lit­tle bit hard­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly in cer­tain dis­tricts, at least as it stands right now to have him in a sub­ur­ban dis­trict in a blue state.” The fundrais­er pre­dict­ed that it would take time for the cor­po­rate PACs that usu­al­ly gives piles of mon­ey to lead­er­ship to open their wal­lets.

    “The PAC world typ­i­cal­ly is not the most coura­geous, and I could total­ly see them take a wait-and-see approach, at least ini­tial­ly.”

    So, wait, are we seri­ous­ly sup­posed to believe that any of the GOP’s major donors haven’t already come to terms with the GOP as a polit­i­cal vehi­cle for what­ev­er-it-takes-includ­ing-pan­der­ing-to-racist-sen­ti­ments no holds barred elec­toral vic­to­ry and gen­er­al crony­ism a LONG time ago? Win­ning elec­tions and shar­ing the spoils and rig­ging the sys­tem so only bil­lion­aires can win. THAT’s the real heart of the GOP.

    Is the same big mon­ey THAT HAS BEEN FINANCING RACE-BAITERS FOR YEARS is going to sud­den­ly get squea­mish about con­tin­u­ing to financ­ing the same par­ty for doing the same thing it’s been doing for over a gen­er­a­tion? Race bait­ing is what gets the rab­ble to get enthu­si­as­tic about dis­man­tling the New Deal. You can’t just sud­den­ly stop a strat­e­gy like that. Dis­man­tling the New Deal is a core GOP val­ue.

    Sim­i­lar­ly, tak­ing mon­ey from poor and mid­dle-class peo­ple of all races and some­how giv­ing it to the wealthy is a basic core val­ue of the GOP’s true base (right-wing bil­lion­aires and thi­er mil­lion­aire min­ions) and pan­der­ing to the white suprema­cists vote is inte­gral to liv­ing accord­ing those val­ues. That’s not sud­den­ly chang­ing.

    Sure, this Scalise thing is poten­tial­ly an issue for donors that are seen giv­ing to a white suprema­cist pan­der­er. But isn’t that what Cit­i­zens Unit­ed is sup­posed to be for when it comes to the major donors?

    Instead, it sure looks the GOP might just be grasp­ing around for an excuse to dump Scalise with­out look­ing like they did it because he was cavort­ing with David Duke’s out­fit. Why? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that Duke is black­mail­ing the GOP with the names of more big­ot pan­der­ers the par­ty does­n’t back off Scalise and stop mak­ing a big deal out the sit­u­a­tion. So the par­ty needs to dump Scalise, but in a way that sends a “We, the GOP par­ty lead­er­ship, total­ly sup­port Scalise, but it’s those over­ly sen­si­tive bil­lion­aires that are forc­ing us to move him out of leadership”-signal so David Duke does­n’t flip out and start nam­ing names.

    Sure, GOP, it’s not that you’re embar­rassed about being direct­ly asso­ci­at­ed with David Duke (as opposed to the nor­mal vague philo­soph­i­cal­ly align­ment with those sym­pa­thet­ic to Duke’s views). You’re not scared of David Duke. It’s the elite donors that are forc­ing you to get rid of Scalise. Uh huh.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 5, 2015, 11:26 pm
  10. The GOP sure is lucky it does­n’t ever have to actu­al­ly deal with its white suprema­cy infes­ta­tion:

    TPM Livewire
    Va. GOP Chair Urg­ing Par­ty To Boot Dave Age­ma Over Lat­est Racist Post

    By Caitlin Mac­Neal
    Pub­lished Jan­u­ary 13, 2015, 3:15 PM EST

    The Vir­ginia GOP chair is work­ing to expel Michi­gan Com­mit­tee­man Dave Age­ma from the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee’s win­ter meet­ing after Age­ma stirred yet anoth­er con­tro­ver­sy with a racist Face­book post.

    Chair­man Pat Mullins is cir­cu­lat­ing a let­ter urg­ing his fel­low Repub­li­cans to keep Age­ma out of the San Diego meet­ing and to boot him from the RNC for good, Nation­al Jour­nalreport­ed on Tues­day.

    Age­ma on New Year’s Eve repost­ed an essay from Amer­i­can Renais­sance, a white suprema­cist mag­a­zine. He has since delet­ed the post, but MLive.com cap­tured a screen­grab.

    “How­ev­er, my expe­ri­ence has also taught me that blacks are dif­fer­ent by almost any mea­sure to all oth­er peo­ple. They can­not rea­son as well. They can­not com­mu­ni­cate as well. They can­not con­trol their impuls­es as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike,” the essay’s author, who claimed to be a pub­lic defend­er, said.

    Age­ma called the arti­cle “enlight­en­ing for any­one who is con­cerned about crime in Amer­i­ca.”

    He then defend­ed his Face­book post in a new post to his page on Tues­day and said that he saw the arti­cle in a newslet­ter by for­mer Rep. Allen West (R‑FL).

    “I make no accu­sa­tion that I agree with the state­ments sup­port­ing the author he post­ed. I do sup­port Col West­’s com­men­tary con­cern­ing the authors arti­cle and not the con­tent of the arti­cle itself,” Age­ma said. “It’s sad that polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect­ness has so tak­en over our soci­ety and is deter­mined by those who desire to move our cul­ture accord­ing to their agen­da.”

    Fol­low­ing the ini­tial post, RNC chair­man Reince Priebus and Michi­gan Gov. Rick Sny­der ® both con­demned Age­ma’s com­ments. The Michi­gan state sen­ate Repub­li­can cau­cus plans to send the RNC a let­ter urg­ing the com­mit­tee to expel Age­ma from the nation­al meet­ing, accord­ing to The Detroit News.

    Mul­ti­ple RNC mem­bers and Michi­gan Repub­li­cans have already called on Age­ma to step down over pre­vi­ous remarks, but Age­ma refused to resign.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 13, 2015, 1:14 pm
  11. Remem­ber when GOP staffers were float­ing the idea that Steve Scalise might have to step down if it impact­ed his abil­i­ty to raise funds from big donors. Yeah, that’s not going to be a prob­lem:

    Politi­co
    Near­ly 300 K Streeters flock to meet Steve Scalise

    The embat­tled House Repub­li­can intro­duced them to his polit­i­cal oper­a­tion and new fundrais­ing team.

    By Anna Palmer

    1/13/15 6:19 PM EST

    Updat­ed 1/14/15 10:51 AM EST

    Steve Scalise may be on the defen­sive on Capi­tol Hill, but he’s still in good stand­ing with K Street donors.

    The No. 3 House Repub­li­can met with near­ly 300 lob­by­ists, con­sul­tants and polit­i­cal oper­a­tives Tues­day after­noon to intro­duce his polit­i­cal oper­a­tion and new fundrais­ing team.

    Poten­tial donors crowd­ed into the third floor of the Capi­tol Hill Club to hear from the Louisiana Repub­li­can, who wel­comed every­one and thanked them for their sup­port. His chief of staff, Lyn­nel Ruck­ert, and his polit­i­cal staff fol­lowed, lay­ing out his new fundrais­ing pro­gram. Sev­er­al Scalise staffers were on hand, includ­ing his pol­i­cy direc­tor Bill Hugh­es, mem­ber ser­vices direc­tor Eric Zulkosky and per­son­al office chief of staff Charles Hen­ry.

    One of the atten­dees described it as a “lock­er room” style ral­ly and relat­ed that staff said they were “look­ing for­ward to a good year.”

    ...

    Dozens of K Streeters were at the event, includ­ing Sam Lan­cast­er of Com­cast, Adam Peter­son of T‑Mobile, Jay Cran­ford of Clark Geduldig Cran­ford & Nielsen, Cliff Ric­cio of NTCA, Mike Fer­ence of the S‑3 Group, Megan Bell of NOIA and Mike Was­com of Amer­i­can Air­lines.

    No one brought up or addressed the con­tin­u­ing fall­out from a 2002 speech Scalise gave to a white suprema­cist group.

    More race-relat­ed news came out Tues­day when The Hill report­ed that Scalise vot­ed against a res­o­lu­tion apol­o­giz­ing for slav­ery when he was in the state­house.

    ...

    Polit­i­cal direc­tor Tyler Daniel said last week that Scalise’s fundrais­ing had not been affect­ed by the news reports.

    “We have con­tin­ued to move for­ward with our first-quar­ter plans,” Daniel said. “We look for­ward to a suc­cess­ful quar­ter and a suc­cess­ful cycle and doing all we can do to keep and expand our major­i­ty.”

    “We have con­tin­ued to move for­ward with our first-quar­ter plans...We look for­ward to a suc­cess­ful quar­ter and a suc­cess­ful cycle and doing all we can do to keep and expand our major­i­ty.” Have fun expand­ing that major­i­ty.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 15, 2015, 3:33 pm
  12. Birds of a feath­er...

    Slate
    White Suprema­cists to Hold Con­fab at the Nation­al Press Club the Week­end of CPAC
    By Bet­sy Woodruff

    If you’re in D.C. for CPAC week­end and inter­est­ed in rub­bing shoul­ders with white suprema­cists, the Nation­al Press Club has you cov­ered. On the evening of Feb. 27, the Press Club will pro­vide space in its down­town D.C. build­ing for an event called “Beyond Con­ser­vatism,” host­ed by the Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute. The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter char­ac­ter­izes the Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute as one of the “most impor­tant” think tanks in aca­d­e­m­ic racism. Its web­site says it is “ded­i­cat­ed to the her­itage, iden­ti­ty, and future of Euro­pean peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and around the world,” and its tagline is, “For our peo­ple. Our cul­ture. Our future.”

    An Evite invi­ta­tion for the event says it will fea­ture speak­ers Peter Brimelow, Richard Spencer, and Jared Tay­lor. Brimelow, as SPLC details, has said Amer­i­ca faces “unprece­dent­ed demo­graph­ic muta­tion” and that 9/11 was due to immi­gra­tion. The Anti-Defama­tion League describes Spencer as “a sym­bol of a new gen­er­a­tion of intel­lec­tu­al white suprema­cists.” Tay­lor has said that “[w]hen blacks are left entire­ly to their own devices, West­ern civ­i­liza­tion — any kind of civ­i­liza­tion — dis­ap­pears.” The SPLC has more on him as well.

    The event coin­cides with the CPAC, which is the largest and most impor­tant annu­al assem­bly of grass­roots con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an activists in the coun­try. The two events are total­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed, but it’s clear that NPI hopes the name of its event will appeal to the con­ser­v­a­tives in town who want to go, you know, beyond.

    Brimelow, Spencer, Tay­lor, and their ide­o­log­i­cal allies often have trou­ble find­ing venues venues to host their anti-black, anti-His­pan­ic, and anti-immi­grant events. Pro­vid­ing a plat­form for white suprema­cists, as it turns out, isn’t great for hotel #brands. But the Nation­al Press Club has no regrets about pro­vid­ing space for the event. Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Bill McCar­ren told me that the press club didn’t invite the group to speak, and that they make space for all sorts of pre­sen­ters.

    ...

    “It’s an open pub­lic forum,” he said. Ear­ly bird tick­ets for the NPI event are already sold out.

    “Brimelow, Spencer, Tay­lor, and their ide­o­log­i­cal allies often have trou­ble find­ing venues venues to host their anti-black, anti-His­pan­ic, and anti-immi­grant events. Pro­vid­ing a plat­form for white suprema­cists, as it turns out, isn’t great for hotel #brands”.

    While host­ing White Nation­al­ist gath­er­ings might be a chal­lenge for some hotels, shar­ing their views at the CPAC con­fer­ence does­n’t seem to be a very big chal­lenge for the White Nation­al­ists.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 5, 2015, 9:47 am
  13. With Don­ald Trump’s con­tin­ued dom­i­na­tion of the GOP’s 2016 field still going strong, the ques­tion of “how long before he implodes?” is steadi­ly get­ting replaced with “can any­one stop him?” But those aren’t the only ques­tions being asked. In par­tic­u­lar, there’s still the pesky ques­tion of whether or not he’ll make an inde­pen­dent bid if he does­n’t get the nom­i­na­tion and feels treat­ed poor­ly by the GOP. It’s a very rea­son­able and rel­e­vant ques­tion giv­en the num­ber of times Don­ald Trump has threat­ened to do just that. And it just got a lot more rea­son­able and rel­e­vant:

    TPM Livewire
    Fox Boss Demands Don­ald Trump Apol­o­gize For Attack­ing Meg­yn Kel­ly

    By Cather­ine Thomp­son
    Pub­lished August 25, 2015, 1:04 PM EDT

    Fox News chair­man Roger Ailes said Tues­day that Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Don­ald Trump has gone too far in crit­i­ciz­ing Meg­yn Kel­ly and needs to apol­o­gize to the net­work’s star.

    Ailes’ state­ment came after Trump went on a Mon­day night tweet­storm upon Kel­ly’s return to the air from vaca­tion.

    In a state­ment pro­vid­ed to TPM, Ailes said:

    Don­ald Trump’s sur­prise and unpro­voked attack on Meg­yn Kel­ly dur­ing her show last night is as unac­cept­able as it is dis­turb­ing. Meg­yn Kel­ly rep­re­sents the very best of Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism and all of us at FOX News Chan­nel reject the crude and irre­spon­si­ble attempts to sug­gest oth­er­wise. I could not be more proud of Meg­yn for her pro­fes­sion­al­ism and class in the face of all of Mr. Trump’s ver­bal assaults. Her ques­tion­ing of Mr. Trump at the debate was tough but fair, and I ful­ly sup­port her as she con­tin­ues to ask the prob­ing and chal­leng­ing ques­tions that all pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates may find dif­fi­cult to answer. Don­ald Trump rarely apol­o­gizes, although in this case, he should. We have nev­er been deterred by politi­cians or any­one else attack­ing us for doing our job, much less allowed our­selves to be bul­lied by any­one and we’re cer­tain­ly not going to start now. All of our jour­nal­ists will con­tin­ue to report in the fair and bal­anced way that has made FOX News Chan­nel the num­ber one news net­work in the indus­try.

    Yes, Roger Ailes demands an apol­o­gy from Don­ald Trump. Good luck with that!

    So now that Don­ald Trump and Fox News are set­tling into fren­e­my sta­tus, the ques­tion of that third-par­ty run just got a lot more inter­est­ing! Espe­cial­ly because there are some dead­lines involved and they’re fast approach­ing. For instance, South Car­oli­na’s GOP has a rule: if you want to run in that state’s pri­ma­ry, you had bet­ter sign a GOP loy­al­ty oath that promis­es you won’t do an inde­pen­dent bid. You bet­ter sign it by the end of Sep­tem­ber. And now oth­er states are con­sid­er­ing fol­low­ing suit.

    So if Trump’s tiff with Fox keeps flar­ing up over the next few weeks, we could be look­ing at a sit­u­a­tion where Trump has to pledge his loy­al­ty to a polit­i­cal par­ty with flag­ship TV sta­tion that’s basi­cal­ly declared war on Trump. Yowza!

    Strange times. But let’s not for­get, they could always get stranger. For instance, let’s not for­get about anoth­er threat recent­ly made by one of the GOP’s fren­e­mies if he was­n’t treat­ed fair­ly. It was one of those fun episodes that the GOP would most assured­ly like us to nev­er remem­ber, but is just real­ly hard to for­get:

    Salon
    David Duke threat­ens to run against “sell­out” GOP con­gress­man Steve Scalise
    For­mer KKK grand wiz­ard con­demns third-rank­ing House Repub­li­can as a turn­coat VIDEO

    Luke Brinker
    Thurs­day, Jan 29, 2015 02:08 PM CDT

    Ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on Wednes­day threat­ened run against the “sell­out” Rep. Steve Scalise (R‑LA), who came under scruti­ny last month when it was revealed that he had spo­ken before a Duke-found­ed white suprema­cist group in 2002.

    Louisiana polit­i­cal blog­ger Lamar White Jr. report­ed in late Decem­ber that Scalise spoke at a con­fer­ence host­ed by Duke’s Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion (EURO). Scalise, who as House Major­i­ty Whip is the third-rank­ing Repub­li­can in the cham­ber, issued a state­ment apol­o­giz­ing for his appear­ance, call­ing it a “mis­take I regret” and con­demn­ing “the divi­sive racial and reli­gious views groups like these hold.”

    When news of Scalise’s speech broke, Duke defend­ed the embat­tled con­gress­man, call­ing Scalise a “nice guy” and ask­ing, “What politi­cian would ever pass up an oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk to his con­stituents?”

    But in an inter­view with Louisiana radio host Jim Eng­ster yes­ter­day, Duke indi­cat­ed that he had soured on Scalise.

    “Steve Scalise, let me tell you some­thing, this is the way I view it now: I mean this guy is a sell­out. I mean he’s a sell­out. He’s not David. He used to say that he was David Duke of course with­out the bag­gage, what­ev­er that means,” Duke said, refer­ring to com­ments report­ed­ly made made to a local polit­i­cal reporter two decades ago.

    Duke took par­tic­u­lar umbrage at Scalise’s apol­o­gy for speak­ing at the EURO con­fer­ence.

    “What he’s basi­cal­ly say­ing is that 60 per­cent of his dis­trict, the same peo­ple by the way who vot­ed for him that they’re just noth­ing but a bunch of racists. You know, I’ve said noth­ing at that con­fer­ence any dif­fer­ent that I ran for office on. It wasn’t a Klan meet­ing,” Duke said. “It wasn’t any sort of a rad­i­cal meet­ing, it was a meet­ing that said there was Euro­pean Amer­i­can rights, right? So he is a sell­out, right? Because, you know he can’t meet with mem­bers of his own dis­trict who have opin­ions like I have but he meets with rad­i­cal blacks who have total oppo­site polit­i­cal posi­tions than him.”

    Duke said he expect­ed Scalise to ride out the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing his EURO appear­ance, but nev­er­the­less main­tained that the con­gress­man should resign due to his apol­o­gy. That marks a sharp turn­around from one month ago, when Duke told the Wash­ing­ton Post that Scalise should remain in Con­gress.

    Mean­while, Duke said he’s con­sid­er­ing an elec­toral chal­lenge to Scalise.

    “I am not reg­is­tered to vote right now. I have legal­ly been able to vote for years but I haven’t reg­is­tered right now and I’d be able to vote for, but I might just reg­is­ter,” he said. “Just so, I might have to run against Steve Scalise because you know, I real­ly might. I mean, I’m def­i­nite­ly going to con­sid­er it because its so dis­gust­ing to me to see…he got elect­ed on false pre­tens­es.”

    Duke added that “the Repub­li­can Party’s issues are my issues,” but said “the dif­fer­ence with me in the Repub­li­can Par­ty is that I didn’t betray them when I got elect­ed.”

    As a Repub­li­can state rep­re­sen­ta­tive in 1991, Duke shocked observers around the world when he made a sur­pris­ing­ly strong show­ing in the Louisiana guber­na­to­r­i­al race. Duke fin­ished a close sec­ond to for­mer Demo­c­ra­t­ic Gov. Edwin Edwards in the first round of vot­ing, gar­ner­ing 32 per­cent of the vote to Edwards’ 34 per­cent and edg­ing incum­bent GOP Gov. Bud­dy Roe­mer, who received 27 per­cent. Edwards defeat­ed Duke by a 61 to 39 per­cent mar­gin in the runoff elec­tion.

    ...

    “The Repub­li­can Party’s issues are my issues...the dif­fer­ence with me in the Repub­li­can Par­ty is that I didn’t betray them when I got elect­ed.”

    Yes, back in Jan­u­ary, David Duke was so miffed with the GOP that he was threat­en­ing to run against the House Major­i­ty Whip, Steve Scalise, after Scalise’s sleazy dis­missals and diss­es of Dukes’ “Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty and Rights Orga­ni­za­tion” even though Scalise was court­ing those very same vot­ers basi­cal­ly using David Duke’s elec­toral strat­e­gy for years! Even if you can’t under­stand Duke’s world­view, it’s not hard to under­stand his frus­tra­tion.

    But that was back in Jan­u­ary, and a whole lot has changed since then. Changed in ways that should make folks like David Duke look far more kind­ly on the GOP than they may have in Jan­u­ary:

    Buz­zFeed
    David Duke On Trump: He’s “Cer­tain­ly The Best Of The Lot” Run­ning For Pres­i­dent

    “I think he under­stands the real sen­ti­ment of Amer­i­ca.”
    post­ed on Aug. 25, 2015, at 10:07 a.m.

    Andrew Kaczyn­s­ki
    Buz­zFeed News Reporter

    David Duke, a for­mer grand wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan and self-described “racial real­ist,” says Don­ald Trump is the best Repub­li­can can­di­date for pres­i­dent because he “under­stands the real sen­ti­ment of Amer­i­ca.”

    Duke, who unsuc­cess­ful­ly ran for pres­i­dent as a Demo­c­rat in 1988 and lat­er served in the Louisiana House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, not­ed Trump’s expe­ri­ence as a sales­man and his “great sense” of what peo­ple want to buy.

    “I praise the fact that he’s come out on the immi­gra­tion issue. I’m begin­ning to get the idea that he’s a good sales­man. That he’s an entre­pre­neur and he has a good sense of what peo­ple want to hear what they want to buy,” said Duke on his radio pro­gram last week after not­ing that he had pre­vi­ous­ly been crit­i­cal of Trump’s run.

    “And I think he real­izes that his path to pop­u­lar­i­ty toward pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty is talk­ing about the immi­gra­tion issue. And he has real­ly said some incred­i­bly great things recent­ly. So what­ev­er his moti­va­tion, I don’t give a damn. I real­ly like the fact that he’s speak­ing out on this great­est imme­di­ate threat to the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    ...

    After going on a rant about “Jew­ish dom­i­na­tion” of the media, Duke said Trump is say­ing things few oth­er Repub­li­cans say about immi­gra­tion

    “Trump, he’s real­ly going all out. He’s say­ing what no oth­er Repub­li­cans have said, few con­ser­v­a­tives say. And he’s also gone to point where he says it’s not just ille­gal immi­gra­tion, it’s legal immi­gra­tion,” Duke said, adding Trump has also talked about com­pa­nies are tak­ing advan­tage of the H1B visa pro­gram. Duke added that he felt the big tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies were head­ed by “Zios.”

    Duke said The Don­ald, while untrust­wor­thy, was “the best of the lot” run­ning.

    “So this is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty,” Duke said. “So although we can’t trust him to do what he says, the oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­dates won’t even say what he says. So he’s cer­tain­ly the best of the lot. And he’s cer­tain­ly some­body that we should get behind in terms, ya know, rais­ing the image of this thing.”

    “So this is a great opportunity...So although we can’t trust him to do what he says, the oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­dates won’t even say what he says. So he’s cer­tain­ly the best of the lot. And he’s cer­tain­ly some­body that we should get behind in terms, ya know, rais­ing the image of this thing.
    It sure sounds like David Duke has found his can­di­date for 2016! But as we just saw, the rest of the GOP estab­lish­ment is basi­cal­ly try­ing to take down Duke’s new can­di­date of choice. And this less than a year after the GOP pub­licly unfriend­ed Duke in a round of epic ass-cov­er­ing.

    All that leaves some obvi­ous ques­tions: Will Trump actu­al­ly stick with the GOP despite the fact that its try­ing to take his can­di­da­cy down? And what about David Duke and his threat to run for Scalise’s House seat? Duke threat­ened to run in Jan­u­ary and, lo and behold, the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date that’s run­ning on the kind of plat­form we would prob­a­bly expect from a Duke can­di­da­cy is dom­i­nat­ing the GOP field. Does­n’t Steve Scalise, the House Major­i­ty Whip, deserve a pri­ma­ry chal­lenge at this point giv­en the GOP’s War on Trump? It seems like some­thing Duke should be con­sid­er­ing right now.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 25, 2015, 6:07 pm
  14. Don­ald Trump respond­ed to ques­tions about his response to David Duke’s qua­si-endorse­ment: Of course Duke prefers Trump over all the oth­er can­di­dates. Every­one likes Trump! Also, Trump does­n’t actu­al­ly know any­thing about Duke but, sure, he’ll repu­di­ate Duke...if that makes every­one hap­py:

    Trump Responds To Praise From White Suprema­cists: ‘Every­one Likes Me’

    ByCaitlin Cruz
    Pub­lished August 27, 2015, 7:40 AM EDT

    Real estate mogul Don­ald Trump respond­ed to reports that his mes­sage is res­onat­ing with white suprema­cists dur­ing a Wednes­day night inter­view on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect,” say­ing, “Every­one likes me.”

    Long­time white nation­al­ist David Duke praised Trump, specif­i­cal­ly the for­mer real­i­ty tele­vi­sion star’s immi­gra­tion plan, on his radio show last week.

    “So what­ev­er his moti­va­tion, I don’t give a damn,” Duke said. “I real­ly like the fact that he’s speak­ing out on this great­est imme­di­ate threat to the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    Despite Duke’s high prais­es, Trump said he had no idea who the for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader was.

    “I don’t need his endorse­ment. I cer­tain­ly would­n’t want his endorse­ment. I don’t need any­one’s endorse­ment,” Trump told Bloomberg.

    Reporter John Heile­mann asked if Trump “repu­di­at­ed” the endorse­ment.

    “Sure,” Trump replied, “if that would make you feel bet­ter. I would cer­tain­ly repu­di­ate. I don’t know any­thing about him.”

    When asked how he felt about peo­ple like Duke back­ing him, Trump respond­ed by say­ing that “every­one” likes him.

    “Peo­ple like me across the board. Every­body likes me,” Trump said, cit­ing the poll from Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling released Tues­day. He led the Repub­li­can con­test in New Hamp­shire with 35 per­cent among usu­al Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers.

    Trump also pro­posed both low­er­ing and rais­ing tax­es.

    “I want to low­er tax­es for the mid­dle class. I want to low­er tax­es for peo­ple that are mak­ing a lot of mon­ey who need incen­tives,” Trump said.

    ...

    So the only White Nation­al­ist that could pos­si­bly be upset about that entire non-repu­di­a­tion ‘repu­di­a­tion’ is David Duke since Trump alleged­ly does­n’t know who he is (which prob­a­bly stung a bit, all things con­sid­ered).

    Will the grow­ing list of antics like this impact Trump’s chances of actu­al­ly get­ting the GOP nom­i­na­tion? Prob­a­bly, although not nec­es­sar­i­ly neg­a­tive­ly.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 27, 2015, 7:56 pm
  15. “I did give him a book about Hitler....But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speech­es, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it inter­est­ing.”:

    Hul­la­bal­loo

    Influ­encers

    by dig­by
    8/28/2015 09:30:00 AM

    You may or may not have seen this 1990 pro­file of Trump but this is cer­tain­ly inter­est­ing in light of ... a lot of things, not least of which is his huge pop­u­lar­i­ty among white suprema­cists:

    Last April, per­haps in a surge of Czech nation­al­ism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her hus­band reads a book of Hitler’s col­lect­ed speech­es, My New Order, which he keeps in a cab­i­net by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a clos­et at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speech­es, from his ear­li­est days up through the Pho­ny War of 1939, reveal his extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty as a mas­ter pro­pa­gan­dist.

    “Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speech­es?” I asked Trump.

    Trump hes­i­tat­ed. “Who told you that?”

    “I don’t remem­ber,” I said.

    “Actu­al­ly, it was my friend Mar­ty Davis from Para­mount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.”

    “I did give him a book about Hitler,” Mar­ty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speech­es, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it inter­est­ing. I am his friend, but I’m not Jew­ish.”

    Lat­er, Trump returned to this sub­ject. “If I had these speech­es, and I am not say­ing that I do, I would nev­er read them.”

    Uh huh.

    “If I had these speech­es, and I am not say­ing that I do, I would nev­er read them.”
    Huh. He must be a nat­ur­al (that was prob­a­bly a poor choice of words).

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 28, 2015, 10:59 am
  16. What’s that high-pitch, inac­cu­rate, and high­ly racist whistling sound com­ing from Don­ald Trump’s twit­ter feed? Is he blow­ing that dog-whis­tle again?

    Oh. Accord­ing to var­i­ous media reports, Don­ald Trump was just blow­ing a ‘con­tro­ver­sial crime statistics’-whistle (that he just hap­pened to get from a neo-Nazi):

    Think Progress
    Trump Tweet­ed Fab­ri­cat­ed Mur­der Stats From A Neo-Nazi And This Is How The Media Report­ed It

    by Judd Legum Nov 23, 2015 9:14am

    Yes­ter­day, Don­ald Trump tweet­ed a series of inac­cu­rate mur­der sta­tis­tics from the “Crime Sta­tis­tics Bureau — San Fran­cis­co.” The bureau doesn’t exist and the sta­tis­tics were fab­ri­cat­ed. It appears the num­bers were manip­u­lat­ed to per­pet­u­ate racism against African Amer­i­cans. For exam­ple, the graph­ic claims that 81% of whites are killed by blacks. The actu­al per­cent­age, based on the lat­est data from the FBI, is 14 per­cent.

    ...

    The image began spread­ing on Twit­ter when it was post­ed by a neo-Nazi who uses a swasti­ka as his avatar. The account almost exclu­sive­ly tweets racist memes.

    Some media out­lets, how­ev­er, took a very char­i­ta­ble approach to cov­er­ing Trump’s tweet. The Hill, for exam­ple, wrote that Trump took “heat for a con­tro­ver­sial tweet about black mur­der rates.”

    ...

    That is not actu­al­ly true. There is no con­tro­ver­sy about Trump’s tweet. It is false and big­ot­ed.

    The Hill’s arti­cle is actu­al­ly worse. Reporter Cory Ben­net writes that “the per­cent­ages do, in some ways, align with Depart­ment of Jus­tice (DOJ) find­ings from sev­er­al years ago.” This is also not true. The per­cent­ages do not reflect the DOJ’s find­ings in a mean­ing­ful way and have been almost cer­tain­ly pur­pose­ly manip­u­lat­ed to per­pet­u­ate racist stereo­types.

    ...

    CNN report­ed that Trump tweet­ed “racial­ly charged crime data.”

    ...

    What he tweet­ed was not data. It was a racist meme.

    Oth­er out­lets, how­ev­er, were more direct. The Wash­ing­ton Post described Trump’s tweet as “very wrong.” The Dai­ly Beast said that Trump used “false sta­tis­tics to make a racist point.” And New York Mag­a­zine not­ed that Trump made a “racist point with [a] wild­ly incor­rect tweet.”

    Still Trump seems to be ben­e­fit­ing from cov­er­age of his antics as “con­tro­ver­sial,” rather than false. In a recent poll of Iowa vot­ers by CBS News, Trump sup­port­ers said their favorite qual­i­ty about his was that he “says things oth­ers are afraid to say.”

    ...

    The poll found Trump lead­ing the field by nine points.

    “The image began spread­ing on Twit­ter when it was post­ed by a neo-Nazi who uses a swasti­ka as his avatar. The account almost exclu­sive­ly tweets racist memes.”
    Wow. We sure have come a long way...on the tread­mill of big­otry...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 23, 2015, 6:12 pm
  17. There are reports that a Trump sup­port­er yelled “Sieg heil” dur­ing a Trump ral­ly last night as a pro­test­er was get­ting vio­lent­ly dragged out by secu­ri­ty. Sad­ly, we can rea­son­ably pre­dict a lot more sto­ries like this in com­ing months...based on all the sto­ries like this from pri­or months:

    TPM News
    From ‘White Pow­er’ To Nazi Salutes: How Tox­ic Can Trump Ral­lies Get?

    By Caitlin Cruz
    Pub­lished Decem­ber 15, 2015, 2:50 PM EST

    Real estate mag­nate Don­ald Trump, who was large­ly dis­missed by polit­i­cal pun­dits when he announced his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign with a ram­bling speech that referred to Mex­i­cans as “rapists,” has been bring­ing sup­port­ers out to his cam­paign events in droves while vault­ing to the top of the GOP field. But along­side those mass­es of sup­port­ers, a small but vocal con­tin­gent of pro­test­ers has been dog­ging Trump ral­lies.

    Racist and big­ot­ed lan­guage has become com­mon­place at the ral­lies, both from Trump sup­port­ers and the can­di­date him­self. But so has vio­lence and degra­da­tion against pro­test­ers who dare to dis­agree with the GOP’s heir appar­ent. The tox­i­c­i­ty seemed to peak Mon­day night in Las Vegas, where Trump sup­port­ers report­ed­ly yelled a Nazi salute and called for a pro­test­er to be set on fire.

    Here’s a time­line to bring you up to speed on how ten­sions between Trump sup­port­ers and pro­test­ers reached that fever pitch.

    Aug. 21: Mobile, Alaba­ma

    One attendee at a Trump ral­ly in Alaba­ma could be heard yelling out “White pow­er!” on cam­era. Trumps cam­paign said it was­n’t aware of that one par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual in a crowd of “30-plus thou­sand peo­ple” who were “recep­tive” to Trump’s mes­sage.

    Oct. 14: Rich­mond, Vir­ginia

    Sup­port­ers here got into phys­i­cal con­fronta­tions with about 20 immi­gra­tion activists, who were even­tu­al­ly escort­ed out by police and secu­ri­ty. One attendee spit in the face of a pro­test­er. There was mutu­al shov­ing. But Trump remained uncon­cerned about the protest because he said “it’s a very, very small group.”

    Oct. 23: Mia­mi, Flori­da

    A man, iden­ti­fied as Ariel Rojas by a NBC affil­i­ate, was dragged out of a Trump cam­paign ral­ly at the Trump Nation­al Mia­mi Doral Resort and kicked by at least one ral­ly attendee. At least three groups were “chant­i­ng pro-immi­gra­tion mes­sages,” accord­ing to reports.

    Nov. 18: Worces­ter, Mass­a­chu­setts

    Trump mocked a pro­test­er who he con­sid­ered “seri­ous­ly over­weight” as the pro­test­er was expelled from the ral­ly.

    “You know, it’s amaz­ing, I men­tion food stamps, and that guy who’s seri­ous­ly over­weight went crazy – amaz­ing. Amaz­ing,” Trump said to cheers. “That’s an amaz­ing sight.”

    Here’s video of the com­ments, from ABC News:

    ...

    Nov. 21: Birm­ing­ham, Alaba­ma

    A Black Lives mat­ter pro­test­er was kicked and pushed as he was forcibly removed from a Trump ral­ly in Birm­ing­ham. Trump yelled from the stage “Get him the hell out of here.”

    Here’s video of the inci­dent:

    ...

    A cam­paign spokes­woman told CNN that the cam­paign “does not con­done” the behav­ior. Trump then told “Fox News Sun­day” that the pro­test­er was “absolute­ly dis­gust­ing” and “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

    Dec. 4: Raleigh, North Car­oli­na

    Trump’s 50-minute speech in North Car­oli­na was inter­rupt­ed at least five times when pro­test­ers in Raleigh yelled “Black Lives Mat­ter!” at the GOP fron­trun­ner. The crowd erupt­ed in boos and secu­ri­ty guards forcibly escort­ed the pro­test­ers from the packed event. “Isn’t it a shame? Thou­sands of peo­ple are pour­ing in and we have to get rid of one per­son,” Trump said. “He’s wast­ing our time.”

    Here’s video of that inci­dent.

    Dec. 11: New York City

    Pro­test­ers, some of whom door crashed and some of whom actu­al­ly paid to get into the fundrais­er, were forcibly escort­ed from the Plaza Hotel in Man­hat­tan. Asso­ci­at­ed Press reporters were also forced out of the hotel’s lob­by.

    Here’s video of some of the pro­test­ers being thrown to the ground:

    ...

    Dec. 14: Las Vegas

    On the eve of the final Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial debate of 2015, Trump host­ed a ral­ly in Sin City that devolved into sup­port­ers yelling racial slurs, call­ing for a pro­test­er to be set on fire and even shout­ing a Nazi salute. A pro­test­er iden­ti­fied as Ender Austin III inter­rupt­ed the ral­ly and yelled for gun con­trol about 10 min­utes into Trump’s ral­ly.

    One attendee yelled “Sieg heil,” a Nazi salute, as the pro­test­er was removed, accord­ing to NBC News.

    ...

    “The tox­i­c­i­ty seemed to peak Mon­day night in Las Vegas, where Trump sup­port­ers report­ed­ly yelled a Nazi salute and called for a pro­test­er to be set on fire.”
    Well, let’s hope we’ve seen peak vio­lence from the Trump’s brown­shirts. Prob­a­bly not, but let’s hope so. You have to imag­ine the GOP’s lead­ers are kind of hop­ing it’s peaked too.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 15, 2015, 3:39 pm
  18. Maine’s GOP gov­er­nor Paul Le Page had an inter­est­ing expla­na­tion for why he should­n’t apol­o­gize for say­ing that hero­in deal­ers from New York City were com­ing to Maine and often “impreg­nate a young, white girl before they leave.” There’s no need to apol­o­gized because he meant to say “Maine women” and just acci­den­tal­ly said “white women”. Also, Maine is 95% white. So it was an acci­dent that’s also 95% accu­rate so it’s all good. That’s his expla­na­tion:

    TPM Livewire

    LeP­age: I Nev­er Said ‘Black’ Drug Deal­ers Knock Up Maine’s White Girls!

    By Caitlin Cruz
    Pub­lished Jan­u­ary 8, 2016, 11:10 AM EST

    Maine Gov. Paul LeP­age ® said dur­ing a Fri­day morn­ing news con­fer­ence that he nev­er men­tioned race when he said New York City hero­in deal­ers often “impreg­nate” white women in his state.

    LeP­age said at one of his reg­u­lar town hall meet­ings on Thurs­day that “guys with the name D‑Money, Smooth­ie” and “Shifty” who sell hero­in in Maine often “impreg­nate a young, white girl before they leave.”

    In Fri­day’s news con­fer­ence, he said that he did­n’t know the race of “D‑Money” and oth­er offend­ers.

    “I get a report, and they’re say­ing his street name ‘D‑Money,’ street name ‘Smooth­ie.’ I don’t know where they’re from,” LeP­age said. “I know where they’re from, I don’t know if they’re white, black, Asian, I don’t know.”

    “If you want to make it racist, go right ahead and do what you want,” he added.

    LeP­age said reporters must “get your heads out of the sands” and accused them of being in the “back pock­ets of Maine blog­gers.” His orig­i­nal com­ments were report­ed by a blog that LeP­age called adver­sar­i­al and were lat­er picked up by the state’s largest news­pa­per, the Port­land Press Her­ald.

    LeP­age opened the news con­fer­ence by para­phras­ing the icon­ic movie char­ac­ter Rocky Bal­boa. He then said he would­n’t apol­o­gize, instead offer­ing that “my brain was slow­er than my mouth.”

    “Instead of ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apol­o­gize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essen­tial­ly 95 per­cent white,” he said..

    Lat­er in the con­fer­ence, he briefly changed his tune. “So if I slipped up and used the wrong word, I apol­o­gize to Maine women,” he said.

    ...

    “Instead of ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apol­o­gize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essen­tial­ly 95 per­cent white.”
    Well that’s all cleared up. What’s next for the GOP’s nev­er-end­ing for­ays into white nation­al­ist pol­i­tics? How about a for­ay of white nation­al­ists into the GOP’s pol­i­tics:

    TPM Muck­rak­er
    White Nation­al­ist PAC Blan­kets Iowa With Robo­calls For Trump

    By Alle­gra Kirk­land
    Pub­lished Jan­u­ary 9, 2016, 3:46 PM EST

    Some reg­is­tered vot­ers in Iowa received robo­calls Sat­ur­day from a white nation­al­ist super PAC that urged them to sup­port Don­ald Trump in the 2016 elec­tion.

    “I urge you to vote for Don­ald Trump because he is the one can­di­date who points out that we should accept immi­grants who are good for Amer­i­ca,” Jared Tay­lor said on the robo­call, paid for by the Amer­i­can Nation­al Super PAC. “We don’t need Mus­lims. We need smart, well-edu­cat­ed white peo­ple who will assim­i­late to our cul­ture. Vote Trump.”

    Tay­lor is the founder of the white suprema­cist mag­a­zine Amer­i­can Renais­sance. The robo­call includ­ed two more endorse­ments from a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian talk show host and the head of the white nation­al­ist Amer­i­can Free­dom Par­ty.

    Rev­erend Don­ald Tan, a Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can min­is­ter and host of Chris­t­ian talk show pro­gram “For God and Coun­try,” encour­aged Iowans to vote for Trump by cit­ing scrip­ture.

    “First Corinthi­ans states ‘God chose the fool­ish things of this world to shame the wise and God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong,’” he says on the call. “For the Iowa cau­cus­es please sup­port Don­ald Trump.”

    The robo­call was closed out by Amer­i­can Free­dom Par­ty chair­man William John­son, who iden­ti­fied him­self only as “a farmer and white nation­al­ist.” John­son, who found­ed the PAC that paid for the robo­call, notes that Trump did not autho­rize it.

    The Amer­i­can Free­dom Par­ty had issued a press release Fri­day announc­ing the launch of the robo­call cam­paign, call­ing Trump its “Great White Hope.”

    Jared Tay­lor also serves as a spokesman for the Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens, which was cit­ed in the man­i­festo writ­ten by Charleston shoot­er Dylann Roof as the group that opened his eyes to what he saw as the scourge of black-on-white crime in Amer­i­ca. Roof went on a shoot­ing ram­page at a his­tor­i­cal­ly black church in June, killing nine parish­ioners.

    Iowa res­i­dent Dave Dwyer, who sent TPM a record­ing of the call, said over the phone, “I’ve lived in Iowa a long time and I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like this.”

    Trump is polling neck-and-neck with Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑TX) among like­ly Iowa Repub­li­can vot­ers just a few weeks before the Feb. 1 cau­cus­es.

    Trump spokes­woman Hope Hicks did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment.

    ...

    “I urge you to vote for Don­ald Trump because he is the one can­di­date who points out that we should accept immi­grants who are good for America...We don’t need Mus­lims. We need smart, well-edu­cat­ed white peo­ple who will assim­i­late to our cul­ture. Vote Trump.”
    One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things about the Trump phe­nom­e­na is that get­ting asso­ci­at­ed with a stunt like this prob­a­bly won’t hurt Trump’s cam­paign direct­ly because white nation­al­ist dog-whistling is a cen­tral theme of his whole cam­paign. He’s clear­ly very com­fort­able with his fel­low trav­el­ers. But you have to won­der how the grow­ing open embrace of Trump by the white nation­al­ists in 2016 will have on the GOP’s gener­ic par­ty brand in 2016 and beyond because the Trump cam­paign sort of dou­bles as free adver­tis­ing for an array of white nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions and that’s why this is prob­a­bly just the start of neo-Naz­i’s open­ly robo-call­ing peo­ple in sup­port of a GOP can­di­date in 2016. The Trump phe­nom­e­na is just too big an oppor­tu­ni­ty for these groups to pass up.

    It’s a dynam­ic that has to be keep­ing GOP strate­gists up at night. Maybe not super late.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 11, 2016, 9:35 am
  19. Maine’s gov­er­nor, Paul Le Page, real­ly, real­ly, real­ly wants every­one to know that just because he insists on pub­licly assert­ing that the state’s hero­in epi­dem­ic — which appears to large­ly be a pre­dictable side-effect of the state impos­ing tighter restric­tions on pre­scrip­tion opi­oid painkillers — is pri­mar­i­ly a con­se­quence of out of state black and His­pan­ic drug deal­ers (who then pro­ceed to impreg­nate a white girl before they leave, accord­ing to Le Page), despite the evi­dence show­ing most of Maine’s deal­ers are white peo­ple from Con­necti­cut. He’s “total­ly not racist” at all and has a desire to shoot any­one would sug­gests oth­er­wise:

    The Atlantic

    Maine’s Gov­er­nor Insists the Prob­lem Isn’t His Racism—It’s Being Called a Racist

    Paul LeP­age sug­gest­ed he might resign amidst an uproar that began when he blamed blacks and His­pan­ics for his state’s hero­in epi­dem­ic and endorsed racial pro­fil­ing.

    David A. Gra­ham
    Aug 30, 2016

    For years, it seemed like no out­ra­geous remark was too far for Paul LeP­age. That is, there was prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing he would not say; and there was no indi­ca­tion that his ever more errat­ic remarks car­ried a polit­i­cal cost. But now the Maine gov­er­nor may have pushed his luck too far.

    Dur­ing a radio inter­view Tues­day morn­ing, LeP­age implied that he might resign. “I’m look­ing at all options,” he said. “I think some things I’ve been asked to do are beyond my abil­i­ty. I’m not going to say that I’m not going to fin­ish it. I’m not say­ing that I am going to fin­ish it.”

    It’s a remark­able moment for the Repub­li­can, who has made his rep­u­ta­tion by offer­ing up out­landish and often plain­ly offen­sive com­ments. The sto­ry began in Jan­u­ary, when LeP­age com­plained that “guys by the name D‑Money, Smooth­ie, Shifty … come from Con­necti­cut and New York. They come up here, they sell their hero­in, then they go back home. Inci­den­tal­ly, half the time they impreg­nate a young, white girl before they leave.”

    At the time, LeP­age insisted—despite the explic­it invo­ca­tion of race—that he didn’t mean to focus on race. But when a cit­i­zen asked him about it at a town hall last week, he had changed his mind.

    “Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the com­ment that black peo­ple are traf­fick­ing in our state, now ever since I said that com­ment I’ve been col­lect­ing every sin­gle drug deal­er who has been arrest­ed in our state,” LeP­age said. “I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poi­son, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus per­cent of those pic­tures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and His­pan­ic peo­ple from Water­bury, Con­necti­cut, the Bronx, and Brook­lyn.”

    Asked to share the sup­posed binders in which he had these images, LeP­age refused. (The ACLU has filed a pub­lic-records request for them.) Oth­er than the alleged binders, there is, as I not­ed in Jan­u­ary, no pub­lic evi­dence to sup­port LePage’s claim that the hero­ic epi­dem­ic is being fed by men of col­or from Con­necti­cut and New York. Vic­tims of the hero­in epi­dem­ic in Maine are, like the state’s over­all pop­u­la­tion, over­whelm­ing­ly white. His­tor­i­cal­ly, hero­in in Maine has come not from minori­ties from those states, but via Cau­casian deal­ers from Mass­a­chu­setts. When asked to back up his state­ments, LeP­age has refused or (lit­er­al­ly) stomped away in anger.

    The next day, Drew Gat­tine, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic state leg­is­la­tor, crit­i­cized LeP­age and said his com­ments did noth­ing to help fight hero­in. LeP­age respond­ed by leav­ing Gat­tine a voice­mail say­ing he was not a racist, call­ing Gat­tine a “social­ist cock­suck­er” and “son of a bitch,” and dar­ing the Demo­c­rat to release the voice­mail, which Gat­tine did. Else­where, he said he wished that duel­ing was legal so that he could chal­lenge Gat­tine and “point it right between his eyes.”

    It’s that mes­sage that has proved to be LePage’s big prob­lem. On Fri­day, he ini­tial­ly offered a non-apol­o­gy, say­ing, “Leg­is­la­tors like Gat­tine would rather be polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect and pro­tect ruth­less drug deal­ers than work with me to stop this cri­sis that is killing five Main­ers a week.” That evening, he backed up his oppo­si­tion to “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” with more inflam­ma­to­ry com­ments.

    “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy, I don’t care what col­or he is,” LeP­age said. “When you go to war, if you know the ene­my and the ene­my dress­es in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red…. You shoot at the ene­my. You try to iden­ti­fy the ene­my and the ene­my right now, the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of peo­ple com­ing in, are peo­ple of col­or or peo­ple of His­pan­ic ori­gin.”

    The prob­lem with LePage’s com­ments is not that they are polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect. It is that based on the avail­able evi­dence, they are fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect. LeP­age is point­ing his fin­ger at blacks and His­pan­ics, but he refus­es to offer any proof to back it up.

    The irony is that LeP­age is hor­ri­fied by the idea of being called a racist. Like many peo­ple con­front­ed with their own racist com­ments, he views the idea of being called a racist as at least as bad as, and per­haps worse than, actu­al­ly com­mit­ting racism.

    When ques­tioned at the town hall on Wednes­day, LeP­age said, “Nobody wants to give you the real sto­ry, but the fact of the mat­ter is, sir, I am not a racist.” (As the man who had asked him the ques­tion not­ed, “I didn’t call you a racist.”) LeP­age also blamed his fury at being called a racist for his voice­mail to Gat­tine. Gat­tine, too, said he had not called LeP­age a racist.

    LeP­age float­ed the remark­able notion that call­ing out racism is equiv­a­lent to using racist and sex­ist slurs dur­ing his radio inter­view Tues­day, say­ing that being called racist is “like call­ing a black man the ‘N’ word or a woman the ‘C’ word. It just absolute­ly knocked me off my feet.”

    The gov­er­nor isn’t a stranger to accu­sa­tions of racism by now, giv­en that he’s been mak­ing racist com­ments for years. He pre­vi­ous­ly said that Barack Oba­ma “hates white peo­ple.” In 2010, he refused to attend­ed a Mar­tin Luther King Day cel­e­bra­tion because it was spon­sored by the NAACP, which he called a spe­cial inter­est. Ques­tioned about that deci­sion, LeP­age replied, “Tell ’em to kiss my butt,” and said he couldn’t be racist because he has a Jamaican adopt­ed son.

    LeP­age, who gov­erns the nation’s whitest state, has made oth­er offen­sive com­ments too, includ­ing liken­ing the IRS to the Gestapo, say­ing a Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­tor likes “to give it to the peo­ple with­out pro­vid­ing Vase­line,” and hop­ing for the Port­land Press Her­ald’s build­ing to blow up. He also admit­ted to pres­sur­ing a non-prof­it into with­draw­ing a job for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­tor, by threat­en­ing to with­hold state mon­ey. Democ­rats tried to impeach LeP­age over that, but they didn’t have the votes to move for­ward.

    ...

    One impor­tant dif­fer­ence this time is that Repub­li­cans are turn­ing on LeP­age. State Repub­li­can lead­ers said that the gov­er­nor need­ed to take “cor­rec­tive action” and met with him to press that real­i­ty, as he acknowl­edged:

    LeP­age said he met with Repub­li­can House and Sen­ate lead­ers Mon­day night at the Blaine House but said he plans to talk with his staff before decid­ing his next move.

    He said his impres­sion from Monday’s meet­ing was that House Repub­li­cans want to “sal­vage what we can and move for­ward.” Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, he said, are “mak­ing demands.”

    Oth­er Repub­li­cans have sug­gest­ed they would sup­port offi­cial cen­sure and have mused on whether LeP­age is strug­gling with “sub­stance abuse, men­tal ill­ness or just igno­rance.” The state’s mod­er­ate Repub­li­can sen­a­tor, Susan Collins, harsh­ly crit­i­cized Don­ald Trump ear­li­er this month, announc­ing she would not vote for him. Collins wrote in a col­umn, “Reject­ing the con­ven­tions of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is dif­fer­ent from show­ing com­plete dis­re­gard for com­mon decen­cy.” Although she has not spo­ken on LeP­age, the com­ment would seem to be apply to him as well.

    In fact, LePage—who endorsed Trump in February—might be some­thing of a cau­tion­ary tale for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee. Like Trump, LeP­age has made his name in pol­i­tics by rail­ing against polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, and often by scape­goat­ing minori­ties for a polity’s trou­bles (alleged black drug deal­ers in Maine; job-steal­ing immi­grants and homo­pho­bic Mus­lims nation­wide). Like LeP­age, Trump seemed to be immune to the rules of polit­i­cal grav­i­ty, float­ing along despite each new out­rage. But both men are encoun­ter­ing what might be the lim­its of such an appeal. Trump has found that his sup­port among Repub­li­cans is weak­er than Clinton’s among Democ­rats, and his elec­toral coali­tion is at the moment too small to bring him to victory—but his past com­ments will make it tougher for him to expand it. LeP­age, mean­while, is now forced to reck­on with the real­i­ty that even mem­bers of his own par­ty are close to fed up, a turn of events that could force him from office.

    “The next day, Drew Gat­tine, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic state leg­is­la­tor, crit­i­cized LeP­age and said his com­ments did noth­ing to help fight hero­in. LeP­age respond­ed by leav­ing Gat­tine a voice­mail say­ing he was not a racist, call­ing Gat­tine a “social­ist cock­suck­er” and “son of a bitch,” and dar­ing the Demo­c­rat to release the voice­mail, which Gat­tine did. Else­where, he said he wished that duel­ing was legal so that he could chal­lenge Gat­tine and “point it right between his eyes.”

    As we can see, Paul LeP­age real­ly, real­ly, real­ly does­n’t like any­one even insin­u­at­ing that he’s a racist. He also real­ly, real­ly, real­ly seems to want to see hero­in deal­ers shot. Specif­i­cal­ly all the black and His­pan­ic ones:

    ...
    “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy, I don’t care what col­or he is,” LeP­age said. “When you go to war, if you know the ene­my and the ene­my dress­es in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red…. You shoot at the ene­my. You try to iden­ti­fy the ene­my and the ene­my right now, the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of peo­ple com­ing in, are peo­ple of col­or or peo­ple of His­pan­ic ori­gin.”

    ...

    Yes, Gov­er­nor LeP­age has iden­ti­fied the ene­my to the peo­ple of Maine: peo­ple of col­or. But this is total­ly not a racist asser­tion because he has evi­dence that they real­ly are “the ene­my” in terms of dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly traf­fick­ing hero­in into the state. He just hap­pens to be the only per­son to pos­sess that evi­dence and curi­ous­ly refus­es to share it:

    ...

    “Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the com­ment that black peo­ple are traf­fick­ing in our state, now ever since I said that com­ment I’ve been col­lect­ing every sin­gle drug deal­er who has been arrest­ed in our state,” LeP­age said. “I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poi­son, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus per­cent of those pic­tures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and His­pan­ic peo­ple from Water­bury, Con­necti­cut, the Bronx, and Brook­lyn.”

    Asked to share the sup­posed binders in which he had these images, LeP­age refused. (The ACLU has filed a pub­lic-records request for them.) Oth­er than the alleged binders, there is, as I not­ed in Jan­u­ary, no pub­lic evi­dence to sup­port LePage’s claim that the hero­ic epi­dem­ic is being fed by men of col­or from Con­necti­cut and New York. Vic­tims of the hero­in epi­dem­ic in Maine are, like the state’s over­all pop­u­la­tion, over­whelm­ing­ly white. His­tor­i­cal­ly, hero­in in Maine has come not from minori­ties from those states, but via Cau­casian deal­ers from Mass­a­chu­setts. When asked to back up his state­ments, LeP­age has refused or (lit­er­al­ly) stomped away in anger.

    ...

    So now we know: don’t call Paul LeP­age a racist. Also, if you’re black or his­pan­ic, you are the ene­my of the peo­ple of Maine. Of this, Paul LeP­age is extreme­ly con­fi­dent. If that seems racist to you, you’re the big­ot:

    ...
    LeP­age float­ed the remark­able notion that call­ing out racism is equiv­a­lent to using racist and sex­ist slurs dur­ing his radio inter­view Tues­day, say­ing that being called racist is “like call­ing a black man the ‘N’ word or a woman the ‘C’ word. It just absolute­ly knocked me off my feet.”
    ...

    And now you know why he’s referred to as Maine’s mini-Trump. So what can we expect to hear next from Maine’s mini-Trump? Well, based on today’s press con­fer­ence, not much. Ever again. Or, more like­ly, an expla­na­tion from LeP­age for why he’s once again speak­ing with reporters since he just declared he’s nev­er speak­ing to the press ever again because he’s sick of these racist ‘gotcha’ moments. Also, he’s total­ly not men­tal­ly ill:

    Politi­co

    LeP­age demands apol­o­gy from reporter, vows to nev­er speak to press again

    By Nolan D. McCaskill

    08/31/16 10:46 AM EDT

    Updat­ed 08/31/16 03:30 PM EDT

    Maine Gov. Paul LeP­age on Wednes­day blamed a reporter in part for his fiery out­burst to a state law­mak­er last week and vowed nev­er to speak with the press again.

    LeP­age last Thurs­day left an obscen­i­ty-laced voice­mail on Demo­c­ra­t­ic state Rep. Drew Gattine’s phone after he was told by a reporter that Gat­tine had called the gov­er­nor a racist. He ordered Gat­tine to “prove that I’m a racist” and warned “I am after you.”

    Speak­ing to reporters lat­er that day, LeP­age expressed his desire to chal­lenge the “snot-nosed lit­tle guy from West­brook” to a duel in which he would point a firearm “right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed lit­tle runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Leg­is­la­ture to help move the state for­ward.”

    LeP­age met with Gat­tine on Wednes­day morn­ing and apol­o­gized to the state leg­is­la­tor and Maine, but he also sug­gest­ed that he isn’t the only per­son who has a rea­son to be sor­ry.

    “After speak­ing with Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Gat­tine, I think that the reporter who put the mic in my face owes the peo­ple of Maine an apol­o­gy as well, because [Gat­tine] nev­er called me racist,” LeP­age told reporters. “He said I made racial­ly [charged] com­ments. Maybe, in my mind, it is seman­tics. But in his mind, after talk­ing to him, it was clear that there was a real dif­fer­ence. Fine.”

    LeP­age con­ced­ed that he may have respond­ed the same way had Gattine’s com­ment been por­trayed accu­rate­ly “because race both­ers me, because I try to help minori­ties.”

    “And I will say this: The biggest dis­crim­i­na­tion in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is not race. It’s pover­ty,” he added. “And we need to edu­cate peo­ple out of pover­ty and not by throw­ing mon­ey at them, and that’s anoth­er area that’s very, very dear to my heart.”

    Maine Democ­rats, who con­trol the state House, have called for LePage’s res­ig­na­tion. And although some Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have said they want to see “cor­rec­tive action,” the House GOP on Tues­day chose not to take any action against the gov­er­nor after meet­ing pri­vate­ly for more than two hours about his inflam­ma­to­ry rhetoric.

    “The House, I believe, is very sup­port­ive. I believe the Sen­ate would like me to leave,” LeP­age said. “That’s the truth. I’m bru­tal­ly hon­est.”

    Despite telling a local radio sta­tion on Tues­day that he may or may not resign and acknowl­edg­ing “maybe it’s time to move on,” his posi­tion was firm Wednes­day.

    “I may not sup­posed to be that sen­si­tive to these things, but I am. I lose sleep over this, and it’s frus­trat­ing when you hear peo­ple talk about cheap polit­i­cal stunts to hurt their oppo­nent and not do the right thing,” he said. “Being called a racist was a hor­ri­ble thing for me. It was enor­mous­ly hurt­ful. It hurt my fam­i­ly. I will not resign, though.”

    What he said he will do, how­ev­er, is stop speak­ing to the media.

    “I will no longer speak to the press ever again after today,” LeP­age said, prompt­ing laugh­ter from reporters. “And I’m seri­ous. Every­thing will be put in writ­ing. I am tired of being caught — the gotcha moments.”

    “You folks live in a sev­en-sec­ond fic­tion world,” he con­tin­ued. “I live in 24-hour real­i­ty.”

    LeP­age accept­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty for what he char­ac­ter­ized as tak­ing the reporter’s “bait.”

    “Frankly, it’s been going on, and after six years I should have caught on, but that was a cheap shot, and he got my goat,” he said. “And I don’t know if he researched and knows that I am very sen­si­tive to help­ing black peo­ple in some of the Caribbean islands, but it’s very, very sen­si­tive, and he hit a wrong but­ton. He hit the wrong nerve.”

    LeP­age said he will seek “spir­i­tu­al guid­ance” from his fam­i­ly and dis­missed spec­u­la­tion that he’s a vic­tim of alco­hol abuse, drug addic­tion or men­tal ill­ness.

    “To whomev­er it was, I’m not an alco­holic and I’m not a drug addict and I don’t have men­tal issues,” he said. “What I have is a back­bone, and I wan­na move Maine for­ward and, you know, in this pol­i­tics, it’s very hard to be a one-man show.”

    LeP­age, who called black and His­pan­ic peo­ple “the ene­my” last week after remark­ing that most drug deal­ers in Maine are minori­ties, denied mak­ing any “racial­ly charged” com­ments.

    “I apol­o­gized for what I did. You need to either not print any more arti­cles about drug traf­fick­ing because every sin­gle thing I did came out of news­pa­pers, and it’s right here,” he said. “I’m sor­ry, but I look at news­pa­pers. Let’s put it this way, human beings are com­ing to Maine and killing Main­ers, and, frankly, I call that mur­der because they know peo­ple will die when they sell that poi­son. Now let’s leave the eth­nic­i­ty out of it. Some of my friends have kids who are dying.”

    ...

    “I will no longer speak to the press ever again after today...And I’m seri­ous. Every­thing will be put in writ­ing. I am tired of being caught — the gotcha moments.”

    Aww...no more self-inflict­ed gotcha moments for Maine’s mini-Trump. Hope­ful­ly this means LeP­age can refo­cus dur­ing his remain­ing days in office and actu­al­ly address an area that’s very, very dear to his heart: the dis­crim­i­na­tion that comes with pover­ty:

    ...
    “And I will say this: The biggest dis­crim­i­na­tion in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is not race. It’s pover­ty,” he added. “And we need to edu­cate peo­ple out of pover­ty and not by throw­ing mon­ey at them, and that’s anoth­er area that’s very, very dear to my heart.”
    ...

    Ok, if Maine’s mini-Trump wants to show how car­ing he is tack­ling pover­ty is a pret­ty good start. Pover­ty cer­tain­ly is a per­va­sive form of dis­crim­i­na­tion.

    That said, the issue of pover­ty may not have been the best top­ic to use to deflect from his bla­tant big­otry. Just be sure not to men­tion this to him. We don’t need any­one get­ting shot.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 31, 2016, 3:00 pm

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