“In the cold war we had an ideological screening test ... The time is overdue for a new test. I call it extreme vetting,”
"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called for a system of 'extreme vetting' for immigrants that would include an ideological test"
Step away from the #2 pencil, loser — you failed the ideological screening test! SAD!
Loyalty Oaths have been around since before the War of Northern Aggression, but were most active recently during the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War. And now the new challenge to loyalty comes with a Trumpian proposal to test immigrants, calling it “extreme vetting”.
But could even approved loyal Americans pass such an exam?
There already are in tehDonald’s mind, “secret Muslims” in the government since 2008, especially in the Oval Office, at least until January 2017. Could Larry Craig pass the exam, or even Franklin Graham. And if you score less than 70%, do you get to take it again or are you restricted in terms of travel or residency to Blue states. In 2012 only 65% of native-born Americans could pass a sample civics test given to immigrants, but don’t feel too bad, only 21% of Americans know that Woodrow Wilson was POTUS during The Great War.
According to The Associated Press, the Republican presidential nominee plans to present a proposal during an address in Youngstown, Ohio, to create an ideological admissions test that would question potential immigrants on positions such as religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights. The test, in addition to combing social media and interviewing friends and families, would be used to determine whether potential immigrants support American values.
www.politico.com/...
So if we swear on Bibles, make pledges before flags, sign loyalty oaths to get jobs, double-secret probation is over except where we look like the wrong ethnicity/race — whatever that means in the USA, since in 1962 drunk libertines might be refused admission and until 1990, your politics could affect your ability to visit the US. Trump’s fool’s errand in this election is not to build a white nationalist party but to appeal to their demographic base even as their ideological stands further dissipate and correspondingly ossify. Pledges and patriotism hide the usual American racialism centering on the usual RWNJs.
During the American Civil War, political prisoners and prisoners of war were often released upon taking an "oath of allegiance". Lincoln's Ten percent plan featured an oath to "faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the union of the States thereunder" as a condition for a Presidential pardon. During Reconstruction, retroactive loyalty oaths were proposed by Radical Republicans, which would have barred former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers from federal, state, or local offices.
In 1952, the "McCarran Walter Act was the first immigration bill since the late 1790s to establish an ideological litmus test for admission to the United States," Robert David Johnson wrote in his book Congress and the Cold War.
Similar to Trump's softened Muslim ban, the bill was motivated by religious intolerance—antisemitism—and governed immigration policy for over a decade.
www.alternet.org/...
And does Second Commandment trump Second Amendment, people, people?
The phrase "under God" was incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954, by a Joint Resolution of Congress…
"From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.... In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource, in peace or in war."
Second Commandment solutions or vetting with extreme prejudice...death by spiritual weaponry...
Does pledging allegiance to the flag violate the Biblical admonition (Exodus 20) against worshipping or bowing down to any graven image
911 pledges are not 9/11 pledges, despite Rudy Giulliani
Orlando Police Dispatcher: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
Omar Mateen: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficent [said in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [said in Arabic]. I wanna let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him [said in Arabic], on behalf of the Islamic State.
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]
And even if you’re a huddling mass, you can yearn to be free after you finish the background check, and biometric scan, and DNA swab, and urine sample, and ancestry.com account login — Who’s your Daddy and when did you stop hating the USA? Do you have the spiritual weaponry for moral rearmament as the neocons revisit 1950s McCarthyism...
"Today's House adoption of the so-called "Pledge Protection Act" is a shameful effort to strip our federal courts of their ability to uphold the rights of all Americans. By removing the jurisdiction of federal courts, including the Supreme Court, from cases involving the Pledge, this legislation sets a dangerous precedent: threatening religious liberty, compromising the vital system of checks and balances upon which our government was founded, and granting Congress the authority to strip the courts' jurisdiction on any issue it wishes. Today, the issue was the Pledge of Allegiance, but tomorrow it could be reproductive rights, civil rights, or any other fundamental concern."
An effective immigration plan or even tourist policy should vet even the most traditional applicant, despite their garb because of course terrorists would cosplay in order to do terror...
Strength through having a Great time
Donald Trump dismissed comparisons of his use of loyalty oaths during recent campaign rallies to Nazi Germany and other dark chapters of history on Tuesday as "ridiculous."
"I mean, we’re having such a great time," Trump told NBC's "Today" in a pre-primary telephone interview.
The loyalty pledges began at a rally Saturday in Orlando, Florida, where Trump asked the crowd: “Raise your right hand: ‘I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote, on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for president."
March 2016 www.politico.com/...
Hail Hydra! “Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras...”
In mapping the inclusiveness of national diversity, we are increasingly reminded of the ethnic classification of the nation’s population by the carving out of predictions of the behavior of the electorate at the polls–partly because the distribution is so relatively easy to map, partly because how such divisions map onto political parties is a growing riddle, not only since it is less clear that their increasing political voice maps onto a single agenda, but also because of the scare of predictions of white-minority status by 2045.
For the apparent cultural remove of the arrogance of an administration that formally instituted the forced geographic relocation of Japanese Americans to camps away from the west coast seems an odd artifact stoked by the proto-fascist flames ignited by the fear of war.
mic.com/...
In the four years before Harry S. Truman, we didn’t have any successful Japanese attacks inside the US.
Like an archaeological excavation, the chart sorts Americans by religious affiliation and race, stratified by age. It shows the decline of white Christians among each successive generation.
Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults.
Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts — including immigration patterns and differential birth rates — this chart also highlights the other major cause: young adults’ rejection of organized religion. Young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).
What’s the broader implication of this generational pattern?
The American religious landscape is being remade, most notably by the decline of the white Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. These religious transformations have been swift and dramatic, occurring largely within the last four decades. Many white Americans have sensed these changes, and there has been some media coverage of the demographic piece of the puzzle. But while the country’s shifting racial dynamics are certainly a source of apprehension for many white Americans, it is the disappearance of White Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions. Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity — one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos — threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.
Even during the Cold War there was an existential decline of White Christian America as it grasped at holding its place by ideology and demographics — Trump is tapping a dry hole of those frightened, LIV folks who cling to an Exceptionalism that is no less hegemonic now than during the Cold War.
I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. ... However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States. ... I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation. March 2, 1953, Pat McCarran