Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Biden administration has issued a Homeland Security alert to law enforcement warning of violent armed Trump cultists taking another bite at the apple over the next month or so.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Friday: believers in the false conspiracy theory that Trump will be reinstated have increased their calls for violence if the former president isn’t back in the White House soon.

“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” the DHS bulletin, obtained by ABC News, said.

The bulletin went on to say that the recent increase in “public visibility” of liars like the My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell, is the reason for the uptick in violent online chatter.

Lindell continues to relentlessly push the Big Lie that the election was stolen, going so far as to say that he expects the Supreme Court to unanimously rule in favor of reinstating Trump as president in August.

“Over the last few days what has occurred is there’s been much more public visibility, meaning the discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities, to where they’re being the topic of discussion on web forums, or more public web forums, and even within the sort of media ecosystem,” a senior DHS official told ABC News.

The drunk-on-Trump crowd has been triggered so much that Homeland Security says they are concerned about the calls for violence increasing further.

“As public visibility of the narratives increases, we are concerned about more calls to violence… Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning,” the bulletin said.

The DHS added that although they do not have specifics of an imminent threat, their “reporting indicates that the timing for these activities may occur during August 2021, although we lack information on specific plots or planned actions.”

Also on Friday, the U.S. Capitol Police said they were aware of an upcoming rally at the Capitol that a former data chief for Trump’s 2016 campaign, Matt Braynard, is promoting. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Braynard talked about the #JusticeForJ6 rally, which is planned for September 18, in support of people who have been arrested in connection with the January 6th attack. “We’re going back to the Capitol, right where it started. And it’s going to be huge,” Braynard told Bannon.

 

The last time we got a warning like this, January 6th happened. We should be paying attention. If not August, then September at the Rally for Insurrectionists on the 18th.

 

Be careful out there, folks.

Sunday Long Read: Flipping The Table

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from author and Tulane professor Bernice McFadden, as she discusses getting a seat at the table in life, and how difficult that is just to be present in the halls of power for Black women in America.

I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?

Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.

Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.

I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.

We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.

For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.

That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?

She said yes.

I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.

I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.

This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.

 

Consciously or unconsciously, people treat you differently because of being Black, and asking folks to examine their own biases rarely works, because people don't perceive acts as biases. The same goes for gender, for how people treat women, and when you're a Black woman, this is a constant hurricane of being othered, being gaslit, and being shamed for even mentioning it.

 

America has lifetimes to go, it seems, before we get to any sort of real parity, but there's one political party absolutely dedicated to preserving white supremacy, and it sure isn't the Dems.

 

Well, most of the time.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

In what should be national front page news, former Trump acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday about Donald Trump's efforts to convince the Justice Department to declare the 2020 elections fraudulent, efforts spearheaded by Rosen's own deputy at the time, Jeffrey Clark.

Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.

The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.

Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.

Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.

On Friday Mr. Rosen told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.

Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.

He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Rosen discussed previously reported episodes, including his interactions with Mr. Clark, with the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called Mr. Rosen’s account “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.”

 

Clark was Trump's conduit in these meetings, funneling what should have been private DoJ deliberations directly to Trump, and Trump would in return give his orders to Clark to take back to Rosen and Donoghue. Rosen resisted several attempts by Clark and Trump to have the elections declared under investigation for fraud because there was no evidence of it.

That's how close we came to a Trump dictatorship. The man Donald Trump specifically replaced Bill Barr with in order to throw him the election didn't throw him the election.

That's it.