Yesterday I pointed out how BuzzFeed News caught the Justice Department sending out an article from known white supremacist site VDare. The Justice Department said the articles came from a third-party internet service that scanned the internet based on keywords and automatically delivered articles from "various sources". Yesterday, they canceled the service, blaming the third-party.
To their credit, BuzzFeed news followed up on the third-party service and found out that the Trump regime has been regularly sending out articles from some pretty terrible right-wing and white supremacist sites, and they've been doing it for months now.
An arm of the Justice Department regularly sent summaries and links to articles from an online white nationalist publication over the last year, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. In addition, similar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyperpartisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.
In daily bulletins about media coverage for the department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the nation’s immigration courts, a government contractor sometimes included links to VDare, an anti-Semitic and racist site whose editor who has claimed that American culture is under threat from nonwhite peoples. That contractor, a Dade City, Florida–based company called TechMIS, also compiles newsletters for other agencies, including the Department of Labor, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Housing and Urban Development.
While these newsletters typically shared articles from local and mainstream national news outlets — including BuzzFeed News — they also regularly delivered content from partisan publications touting anti-immigration rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Among these publications: the Western Journal, a hyperpartisan publisher whose founder once questioned if then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was Muslim, and the Epoch Times, a newspaper associated with the Chinese Falun Gong movement and whose related media properties have backed QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming a group of high-ranking officials known as the “Deep State” is subverting President Donald Trump’s goals.
On Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that an immigration judges union sent a letter of complaint to EOIR for its inclusion in an August newsletter of a VDare blog post that attacked its members with anti-Semitic slurs. After publication of that story, an EOIR press secretary said that the Department of Justice “condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms” and that the post should not have been included. A former senior DOJ official said that the email in question was “generated by a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings for staff. It is not reviewed or approved by staff before it is transmitted.”
“That’s absolutely incorrect,” said TechMIS CEO Steven Mains, adding that EOIR was the most specific and particular of the company’s clients. The agency’s staff would review its work “down to misspellings” if there was anything wrong before sending, he said.
A cursory review of EOIR newsletters by BuzzFeed News found two more mentions of VDare articles; Mains confirmed those and noted there were four others, saying that VDare had been included on seven occasions out of about 20,000 links and articles sent from September 2018, when TechMIS’s relationship with the organization began.
“These discoveries are deeply disturbing,” said Becca Lewis, a research affiliate at Data & Society, who studies online radicalization. “Unfortunately, they mark a continuation of a long history in which government agencies, and particularly law enforcement agencies, have promoted and enforced white supremacist and racist agendas. This also unfortunately shows that many white supremacist and far-right publications that seem to be on the ‘fringes’ of society actually have huge mainstream influence and impact.”
White supremacists are running the government, and sharing crazy, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and radical conspiracy nonsense links across the federal bureaucracy. And if you don't think each of these links is being approved by someone high up in the various Trump regime cabinet departments, well, you've not been paying attention to Trump.
This is absolutely being done on purpose to radicalize the government against those people.
It's not just the federal government either. White supremacy is now acceptable at the state and local level too.
A city council candidate in Michigan said Friday she has no plans to end her campaign after shocking a public forum when she said she wants to keep her community white “as much as possible.”
Jean Cramer made the comment Thursday in response to a question about diversity in Marysville, a city in St. Clair County, 55 miles (88 kilometers) northeast of Detroit. The Times Herald in Port Huron said she’s one of five candidates running for three council seats in November.
More than 90% of Marysville’s 9,700-person population is white.
During a follow-up interview Friday outside her Marysville home, Cramer doubled down on her statements. She said if there is a biracial marriage in their family, she could understand why her stance might upset her neighbors.
“Because those people don’t know the other side of it,” she said. “For whatever reason, I’ve heard, they love each other, whatever, but there’s also such a thing as remaining single. People don’t necessarily have to get married, and, if they love somebody, love them single. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Cramer, 67, contends the bible backs her beliefs and asserts she doesn’t believe she is a racist, despite the condemnation of her views.
“As far as I know, as long as we’ve been here, Marysville has been a white community, a white city,” she said. ”. If we have seen a black person here and there, whatever, we’re not bothered by it. I’m not bothered by it."
I still stand by the theory that much of white America turned on Barack Obama after Trayvon Martin. For people older than myself, that was the last straw. "We elected a black president and he dares to say there's still racism in America? We'll make sure that never happens again."
The direct result of that was viewing Hillary Clinton as a traitor to her race, a white person who wanted to enact and expand on Obama's policies and that was just too much. So now we have exactly what older Gen X and Boomers wanted: Reagan 2.0, the revenge, to burn down everything because they know as bad as things might get, it'll never be "I'm black or brown in America in 2019" bad for them.
Trump freed them to be able to say it out loud, and they'll never go back. Never.
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