Trump Admin Is Anti-Semitic, Racist Human Garbage Demanding Challenge by Decent People

"It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over
again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed
on one people, then no one is safe. ... This too
is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers
who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion.
Let them now find pious words and raise
their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue."
—  Ralph McGill,
A Church, A School
Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958

Updated - Madison, Wisconsin — It's been clear for years Donald Trump is a racist and anti-Semite who used the far-right to cobble together an improbable Electoral College majority.

Recall the first days of Trump's term in 2017 when this gang of idiots babbled on about Holocaust Remembrance Day, it got worse three months later.

Any analyses on we, America, political culture, coming together, healing are so much blather. Any both-sides, false equivalence nonsense should be challenged.

The people who commit these acts of terror and spew hate know their kindred garbage in the White House.

All are the enemy of decent, intelligent Americans.

The Trump administration should be renounced and repudiated as collaborators.

Pittsburgh is the work of the Republican Party's decades-long, divide-and-conquer and demonization effort.

This is not us, not America, this is one Party under Trump who has summoned forth killers to take center stage on Trump's grand show, unbowed by his "bad hair" day incurred after the massacre.

Trump got what he wanted, and noone can say they didn't see this coming.

Trump this morning tweeted his thoughts on how the perpetrators of the massacre were given aid — by the media:

There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018

Republican-supporting Americans. Do you get it?

Writes Jonathan A. Greenblatt this morning in the NYT:

More than 100 years ago, the lynching of a Jewish factory superintendent, Leo Frank, in Marietta, Ga., shocked the Jewish community and the nation. It directly led to the formation of the A.D.L. to fight anti-Semitism.

The Pittsburgh massacre should be a similar shock to us today, waking us up to the anti-Semitism and hate in our midst and reminding us all that the fight against them must be diligently fought at every turn by each and every one of us.

Every one of us.

Reminds me of what our friend, Mikey Weinstein, said when asked, "Are we facing the same level of hate that we faced in the late 1950s and early 60s?"

Said Mikey:

No, we’re not. It’s far worse. … [For example,] the situation with this thing with [Col Donald] Higgins is Higgins might probably try to argue that the Jews blew their own synagogue up themselves. The most base, evil, cold, calculated, old-school type of anti-Semitism, Mike, is simply telling lies about Jews. 

That was nine years ago.

Weinstein runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation which publishes its hate mail.

You want to know how bad it is today? Consider a typical piece of hate mail, given a response by Mike Farrell.

The exchange is reproduced below, and was published Oct 26, one day before the massacre at the Pittsburgh Synagogue:

Note From MRFF Editor: Mikey Weinstein and MRFF get called bigoted names often; however, antisemitism is especially common. While one might find themselves getting numb to hate referencing Nazi’s and the Holocaust, let us all remember how bad things once were. On this day, “26 Oct 1942, Nürnberg, Germany: 95 scientists gathered to review the result of Dr. Sigmund Rascher’s freezing experiments using concentration camp prisoners as subjects.” – (source): ww2db.com/event/today/10/26/1942

______

From: (withheld)

Subject: Halloween’s Evilest Demon

Date: October 26, 2018 

To: Mikey Weinstein

Mr.Wienstien,

I want to say a few straight things from the heart to you sir.

My husband (who a proud airman and even more prouder Christian) and I and our children belong to a Bible believing congregation of spirit filled Christian patriots not more than 2 miles from the military base we are stationed at.

For years we have watched you and your tribe attack Christian military men who spread The Redeeming Word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Course you never would attack a jew man or moslem military man because you and your little tribe of bullies only target us Christians.

We airmen and our church brother snd sisters are sick of the likes of you and yours taking our free religious rights away from us because we worship Jesus. Your just a villain who picks on Christians in the armed services. Turn the other cheek? My butt we will when it comes to you.

This Halloween should be dedicated to you and the MFRF because you all are the evilest of demons and you don’t even wear a costume.
I have seen the many pictures of you and you wear your evil well sir. You should be ashamed of yourself. In the service of satan. And with a smile too.

Plus being jew you would think you would love Christians who saved your tribe from the Nazis who had just had had enough of them.

Your a disgrace to your jew clan and AF Academy our military and our America. Not your America sir. Our Great America.

Jesus will take care of you and MFRF henchmen when you die sir. Nothing you will say will save you from the flames of Lake of Fire.

We pray we get to watch and enjoy Christ’s revenge from Heaven. You reap what you sew sir. And you reap the burning of your flesh in satan’s hell forever. LEAVE US CHRISTIANS ALONE DEMON!

Do not try to talk your evil back to us with your clever voice of satan Mr. Wienstien. This e-mail will reject your satan heresy sir.

---

Response from MRFF Advisory Board Member Mike Farrell

From: Mike MFO <mfocontact@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Halloween’s Evilest Demon Date: October 28, 2018 at 11:18:51 AM MDT
To: Michael L Weinstein <mikeyw4444@icloud.com>

Dear (name withheld),
I’m sorry, I don’t know how to pronounce your name. I note it has an x in it. You’re not, by any chance, related to Malcolm? Somehow I don’t think so.

While I appreciate your credentials, having presented yourself as the wife of a “proud airman and even more prouder (sic) Christian,” I suggest you reconsider the grammar. But that aside, speaking “from the heart,” as you claim to do, is appreciated.

In that vein, let me point out that you’ve misspelled Mr. Weinstein’s name. I’m sure it was an innocent mistake, but I know as a good Christian you’d want to be sure you were putting things correctly.

Assuming you consider me part of Mr. Weinstein’s “tribe,” as you suggested, let me try to clarify a few things in the hope you’ll take the information back to the Bible believing congregation of spirit filled Christian patriots to which you, your husband and your children belong.

First, if you’ve actually watched our work “for years,” as you say, you’ve seriously missed the point of what we’re doing. I urge you to pay attention more closely. You see, we have no problem with “Christian military men who spread the Redeeming Word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” That’s their privilege, as long as they do so in the proper time, place and manner as prescribed by military regulations.

You see, if you had in fact watched our work carefully, you’d know we don’t “attack” people for their beliefs, as you have claimed here. We do have a problem, of course, when people who believe their particular faith is the one and only true belief system and demand everyone else believe just as they do or suffer the fires of whatever hell their belief provides. That contradicts every American’s constitutional right to believe as she or he chooses. It is against the law and when it happens we see that it is stopped.

Further, when you suggest, as you have here, “you never would attack a jew (sic) man or a moslem (sic) military man because you and your little tribe of bullies only target us Christians,” you’re entirely wrong. I hate to have to say that, but it’s what happens when you don’t pay close attention. (And, speaking of attention, you really should pay more of it to spelling and grammar.) To your point, we oppose the imposition of any belief system, whether the ones you’ve misspelled here or the many others, on the women and men in the military. The freedom to believe as one chooses, whether it be commitment to a religion or no religion, a faith, a creed or something of one’s own construction, is a fundamental American right, and our mission is to defend that right.

So you see, when you say you and your church brethren and sisters “are sick of the likes of you and yours taking our free religious rights away from us because we worship Jesus,” you are again, I’m sorry to say, wrong on every point. We’re not taking your “free religious rights away” and we have no problem with your worship of Jesus. Now, you may think we’re taking your rights away if you think it’s your right to shove your beliefs down the throat of others, but I can’t imagine a “spirit filled Christian” who speaks “from the heart” would do such a thing. Can you?

And that’s the critical question, isn’t it? It’s one that is raised when you call Mr. Weinstein “a villain who picks on Christians in the armed services” when he does nothing of the kind. Because he calls out bigots who demean those who don’t share their belief system and some of those bigots happen to call themselves Christians doesn’t make Mr. Weinstein a villain, it just exposes fake Christians for what they actually are: hypocrites.

Speaking of which, Ms. Spirit Filled Christian Patriot who Speaks from the Heart, your comment about your “butt” when referring to turning the other cheek makes abundantly clear that you are one of those faux-Christians who proclaim their devotion to Jesus while picking and choosing which of his teachings you’ll honor and which you’ll ignore.

How does Jesus feel, do you suppose, when someone who claims to be a “spirit filled Christian” could even think of the words, “Plus being jew you would think you would love Christians who saved your tribe from the Nazis who had just had had enough of them.” Have you no shame, Ms. x? No, you clearly have none. You, who claim to be a believer in Jesus, can find it in what passes for your heart to infer that it was the Jewish people and their behavior, or, truth be spoken, their very existence, that caused the Nazis to lose patience with them and eliminate millions of them – each one of whom was a brother or sister of Jesus himself – from the face of the earth.

Your casual inhumanity, madam, is disgusting. It is the kind of mindlessness that not only tolerates but creates the madness acted out by yet another crazed, hate-filled person in Pittsburg, PA, yesterday who slaughtered human beings because he, too, “had had enough of them.” I suspect he, too, was filled with spirit. One wonders, in comparing their results, how different his spirit is from your own.

So now, having clarified just who you are and where you stand, I can properly file your hopelessly anti-grammatical, grossly misspelled message and your embarrassingly incoherent attacks on Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF in the round file with the rest of the painfully stupid messages we get from self-righteous people like you who claim to be passionately devoted to Christ yet because they have no comprehension of the true meaning of Christianity, treat it like a cult.

Mike Farrell
(MRFF Board of Advisors)

Christian Nutbags—Killing Public Schools for god

Scott Walker is the face of the religious right in Wisconsin

The presidential election of 2016 highlights the scenario that most everyone thought could happen, but guessed it wouldn't.

The election of Donald Trump is the consequence of the mass base for fascism that has long defined white America and opportunistic rightwing money willing to use the white, 'liberal-Jews-did-it' lunatics populating rural Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Never could figure out why so many otherwise bright political commentators pass on describing rightwingers for what they are. In any event, it is not merely the white-christian-gaping-puke vote that propelled Trump into office. Rightwingers need funding and organization.

Rightwing money is forever busy, post-Citizens United, (Cornell University Law School).

Rightwingers, the white-supremacist Alt Right, are here.

They are staffing up poll worker rosters, municipal committees, school boards, state legislatures, and gubernatorial seats, and so consider Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for the United States Secretary of Education, (Zernike, NYT).

Rightwingers are dumb, they're bigoted and mean, and buoyed by Trump in a way most of us will never understand, they are now unmoored declaring: 'They're in charge now.'

DeVos wants to eviscerate public education, a long-term project of the Evangelical rightwing still resentful of biological evolution, climate change, rules of inference, and empirical science.

Those know-it-all liberals, Universities, pubic education, civil rights, god is watching and the rightwing will burn it all down, though likely in Wisconsin at least, you won't read about it in your daily newspaper.

Look, if Wisconsin can normalize Scott Walker and the radical religious right, (and Wisconsin has), the United States can normalize Trump, DeVos and other assorted loons.

Here's a cautionary tale of Betsy DeVos and the coming demise of public education from a pro-public school voice in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

By John Thompson, NonDoc

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma— Yes, the Donald Trump nominee for the U.S. Secretary of Education is the same Betsy DeVos who cheered the defeat of SQ 779 and helped fund pro-voucher candidates for the Legislature. She’s the same Amway heiress who pushed the expansion of Oklahoma City’s KIPP charter school

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Betsy DeVos wants to make America’s public education sector into a national version of the starved Oklahoma school system. The founder of the American Federation for Children wants to complete the full ALEC, Koch Brothers, Walton Foundation for-profit, privatization agenda in our state and the rest of the nation.

But it is even worse than that.

DeVos’ political ties like a who’s who of conservatism

As the Mother Jones analysis reports, Richard DeVos Sr. “was an early member and funder of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of hardline conservative leaders founded by Left Behind author Tim LaHaye.”

Betsy’s father was also a founder of the conservative, Christian, anti-choice Family Research Council. Her brother founded the infamous Blackwater private-security company. Disgraced Texas congressman Tom DeLay advanced their agenda under the informal name of the Amway caucus.

Other DeVos allies include gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, Texas investor Harold Simmons, activist attorney Jim Bopp, general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, who also was the chief architect behind the controversial 2010 Citizens United case and, last, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, of course. DeVos also used the Oklahoma Right to Work experience to inform her campaign to break unions in Michigan.

Intertwined conservative zealotry

And that brings us back to the imminent threat that the DeVos/Pence/Trump team represents for Oklahoma. A recent Oklahoman editorial praised the role of business leaders, who invested millions of dollars in a “wide range of education reforms, including vouchers, charter school expansion, merit pay and more.” Responding to a presentation by a reformer from Pence’s state of Indiana, the Oklahoman proclaimed, “The lessons of Indiana apply not only to education reform in Oklahoma, but to all conservative policy areas.”

A national exposé by Media Matters explains how those intertwined, mostly hidden, corporate-funding networks have choreographed an extreme, anti-government campaign. It notes:

Betsy DeVos is also the co-founder and current chair of the boards at the anti-teachers-union state advocacy groups Alliance for School Choice and American Federation for Children (AFC) and a close friend of teachers union opponent Campbell Brown, who also serves on AFC’s board. DeVos also sits on the board of [Jeb Bush’s] the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Through the DeVos Family Foundation, the DeVoses have given millions to anti-teachers union and pro-privatization education groups.

Here’s the real danger DeVos represents: She is not just a run-of-the-mill corporate school reformer who promotes “public charter schools” under the auspices of bringing disruptive innovation to public schools. She pushes a for-profit privatization agenda that is doing for schools what privatized jails and prisons did for nonviolent offenders; what privatized water systems did for the citizens of Flint, Michigan; and what Blackwater’s mercenaries did for Iraqi noncombatants (and the American soldiers who faced the retaliation sparked by Blackwater’s abuses).

Even Oklahoma reformers shy away from DeVos’ platform

The reformers I know personally are uncomfortable about the Christian Right component of DeVos’ and Pence’s ideologies. They’d prefer not to think about the way that 80 percent of the charters in DeVos’ Michigan are for-profits, or the way that Pence’s Indiana vouchers break down the constitutional separation of church and state (as well as the homophobic dimension of that state’s movement). Reformers who are actually connected to schools tend to distance themselves from the multitude of scandals spawned by for-profit charters and virtual schools.

Not many Oklahoma reformers feel comfortable with online charters like ABLE Charter School, which the state ordered to close. As Oklahoma Watch reported in July, “Of the 93 students enrolled at the start of the school year, just 12 remained in the [ABLE] program for the full year.” After all, virtual charters are perfect examples of schools that collect state funds for as many students as they can recruit, but they don’t have to keep those students for long.

Neither do Oklahoma reformers like to think about the three-year investigation into our state’s Epic virtual schools. Epic is the state’s largest charter, serving more than 8,000 students, but it can’t even document its attendance rate. Neither does Epicseem able to answer charges filed in California for predatory practices and that state’s findings that the Oklahoma-based charter is “without any transparency, accountability and oversight.”

Two kinds of reform

Non-educators and educators alike have failed to fully distinguish between so-called “public charters,” which are pushed by people who at least hope that they will figure out ways to hold choice schools accountable, versus private charters, which don’t have to try to make that claim.

Still, I admit to paying more attention to the charter supporters with whom I can converse and try to persuade and/or collaborate than to the real powers behind the corporate reform movement and their “dark money.”

Most reformers whom I know personally support the private governance of charters and charter management systems (CMOs), but they would reject the total privatization of public schools — just as they would oppose the privatization of prisons, social security and the military. I’m sure that some local reformers will be tempted to support Trump’s and DeVos proposed $20 billion campaign for public and private, non-profit and for-profit schools, but others will refuse to cooperate with the racist, sexist and xenophobic administration.

‘Choice’ options under DeVos would threaten OKCPS, [Oklahoma City Public Schools]

Here’s the big irony: Corporate reformers who have demonized teachers, unions, education schools and school boards have often spoken privately of their mixed feelings about uniting with right-wing reformers. They did so, I’m often told, because they believed it was necessary for Democrats to prove their toughness by battling unions and other loyal Democrats. The Obama administration, for instance, adopted an ALEC-lite, Scott Walker-lite and Betsy DeVos-lite education agenda in an effort to keep the far-right from completely destroying public schools. In doing so, they inadvertently opened the door to mass charterization and an American president with strong support from the alt-right.

Now, we must prepare for the second half of the “one-two punch.” Under a DeVos administration, “choice” options will be defined as including the unchecked expansion of vouchers, for-profit charters and virtual schools. If conservative, neoliberal and liberal supporters of “public school charters” don’t reconsider their relationship with DeVos, Pence, Trump and the rest of the ALEC/Koch brothers agenda, the future of the OKCPS, (Oklahoma City Public Schools), is even more in doubt.

[Dr. John Thompson is an award-winning historian and an award-winning inner-city teacher. Now retired, he is the author of A Teacher's Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids.]

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