DeVos Privatization Brings Racist "New Jim Crow" Education To Detroit Schools

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Saturday January 28, 2017 · 5:53 AM PST

2017/01/28 · 05:53

As Michele Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow searingly documented, during the 1980s and 1990s the “war on drugs” enabled the rise of a mass incarceration-driven racist caste system that targets and strips millions of African-American men charged with felony crimes of basic rights enjoyed by other American citizens.

But there’s another “New Jim Crow” on the rise.

In the 1950s, as an outgrowth of the rising civil rights movement, the overthrow of school segregation had helped establish quality education as a basic right of citizenship for Americans of any skin color.

Now, a school privatization push led by the Michigan-based DeVos clan and spearheaded by Betsy DeVos is quickly imposing another inadvertent, separate and unequal “New Jim Crow” regime — inflicted by multimillionaire and billionaire activist dilettantes who have little actual expertise in education — upon those with the least political clout, especially African-American children in the inner cities.

What would Betsy DeVos do if nominated for secretary of Education ? Look to Michigan, suggests author and researcher Russ Bellant, whose prophetic 1996 book The Religious Right In Michigan Politics described the rise of the movement which, via Trump and the takeover of Congress and the Senate, has seized the federal government.

In Michigan, and especially Detroit, the DeVos-led school privatization push is, according to Bellant, “accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan”.

Over the last two decades DeVos political donations have encouraged Michigan legislation that has opened up an unaccountable “wild west” proliferation of for-profit, unaccountable Detroit-area charter schools.

In stark contrast to the names of DeVos-funded front organizations created to champion privatization — groups like “The American Federation For Children” and “All Children Matter” — some children seem to matter less in Betsy DeVos’ brave new charter school regime and many, even most, of those children happen to be African-American.

Anecdotal evidence that DeVos-style school privatization promotes a new, ugly form of structural racism comes from the personal testimony of, for example, Detroit mother of eight Michele Phillips who writes, of her experience with Detroit charters,

“choice” meant dragging my kids out of bed at 5 a.m. each morning and paying to put them on the city bus. The bus could be an hour, even two hours late, but the school would lock its doors 45 minutes after the opening bell. If my kids were late, the school would make them go home and miss the entire school day.

I later realized that it’s not an accident that charter schools don’t offer buses, or that many are downtown, far from the neighborhoods where families like ours live. These schools don’t want low-income kids like minention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.”

Is the real DeVos agenda about quality education, or simply about tearing down secular education in order to advance a theocratic religious agenda in which public money increasingly flows to private religious schools ?

A number of recent data points support that conjecture. One is Betsy DeVos’ recently exposed 2001 statement that she considers public education a means to “advance God’s kingdom”. More recently, in 2015, DeVos called public education “a dead end”. ‘Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America's Schools to Build "God's Kingdom’, argues a major Mother Jones story. DeVos “Used God and Amway to Take Over Michigan Politics” charged a Politico story.

Writing for The Atlantic, Allie Gross covers the DeVos family’s key role in tearing down Michigan educational regulations that enforce minimal standards and ensure accountability.

And in a well-supported New York Times op-ed from author Katherine Stewart — whose book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children exposed a massive fundamentalist push to infiltrate public schools with proselytizing bible clubs — argues that Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education is merely one part of a broader, dominionist agenda now being inflicted upon America by the Christian right through the Trump administration.

Stewart’s accusation has some strong backing evidence — in the early 1990s the recently incorporated Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation began funding a new Christian right “family values” Michigan nonprofit called the Foundation For Traditional Values.

The DeVos’ foundation continuously funded FTV for almost two decades. Betsy DeVos was honorary co-chair of FTV’s first major fundraising event, actively participated in FTV, and was listed on its advisory board into 2015.

FTV’s sole program is a Michigan fundamentalist summer camp that indoctrinates teens who are from homsechooled and from Christian private schools in the “biblical worldview” and trains them to become political activists.

FTV head James Muffett has stated his hope to see “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation”.

FTV, and its camp, embodies the true DeVos project — not better education for poor inner city kids but, rather, reclaiming America for Christ or, at least, the DeVos version of Christ, a stern, punitive “biblical capitalist” Christ who will rule with a rod of iron, through his chosen elect. Such as Betsy DeVos.

YouTube Video

Betsy's "Jesus Camp" - DeVos' Fundamentalist Boot Camp For the Future "Army of God"

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Wednesday January 25, 2017 · 7:32 AM PST

2017/01/25 · 07:32

Remember the disturbing 2005 documentary “Jesus Camp”, about a Christian fundamentalist summer camp that was raising up a new generation, as an “army of God”, to enter politics and carry on the culture wars ?

Well, Betsy DeVos — who will likely soon be confirmed as Donald Trump’s new secretary of education — began funding a very similar venture in the 1990s : the Student Statesmanship Institute, a creationist, anti-gay, “biblical worldview” politics summer training camp.

“Jesus Camp” included footage of camp director Becky Fischer stating her hope that children at her camp might achieve a similar level of dedication as young Hamas suicide bombers.

By contrast, Betsy DeVos’ own “Jesus camp” looks to the ability of 20th Century tyrants such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Lenin to mobilize young people. That’s not hyperbole on my part. It comes straight from a 2014 SSI video (see link, above) celebrating the program’s 20th anniversary.

YouTube Video

In 2010, the Student Statesmanship Institute's annual fundraising banquet, that each year raises money to fund the SSI program, featured as its keynote speaker the former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. While serving as a U.S. Senator, Santorum told the Associated Press that same-sex marriage could lead to pedophilia and “man on dog” bestiality.

Following Santorum’s 2010 SSI keynote address, SSI founder and head James Muffett told SSI supporters at the banquet of his hope to see “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation”.

Especially zealous SSI students can join SSI’s elite “Ambassador League”, a yearlong program of indoctrination and training towards a career of political activism. Ambassador League student activities include writing letters to the editor. Some examples: one such published letter stated that, according to the Bible, homosexuals can’t get into heaven. Another, published 6 days before the 2012 presidential election, declared,

“everyone should stand firmly against the lies and trickery of the president. He is shoving America down the wastebasket.”

When publicly confronted, in questioning before the U.S. Senate, with the record of what her Prince Family Foundation had been funding (Betsy DeVos has for upwards of two decades been officially listed as a Vice President of the foundation along with Blackwater founder Erik Prince) DeVos simply denied any involvement by claiming that her being listed as a VP on years and years of Prince Foundation 990 tax forms was simply a “clerical error”.

But the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation was back in the 1990s funding very similar causes as the Prince Foundation has funded in the decade of the 2000s — such as the Family Research Council (listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group) and Focus on The Family.

And, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation also funded the Student Statesmanship Institute, starting in the 1992-1993 calendar year. That funding continued up into 2010, and Betsy DeVos was listed on the SSI Advisory Board up into 2015.

Total Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation funding of SSI since 1992 has been at least $232,000, and that total increases to $369,000 if one includes funding from the Prince Family Foundation and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation whose board membership tightly interlocks with that of the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation.

But it’s about more than money — since 1993, when Betsy DeVos was honorary chair of the first major fundraiser for SSI’s parent nonprofit (The Foundation For Traditional Values, whose sole enterprise is running SSI) Dick and Betsy DeVos have given SSI something more valuable — their name. DeVos.

In Michigan, the DeVos name is huge — the conjoined DeVos/Prince dynasties are now probably the most powerful single force in Michigan politics.

The DeVos family has spearheaded what has become the almost complete capture of Michigan government by the conjoined forces of radical privatization and the religious right. The DeVoses represent the confluence of those two tendencies.

Now, American mainstream media has been loath to recognize that Betsy and Dick DeVos are squarely in the religious right, as much as any single national figure recognized as such, like Rick Santorum.

But it goes deeper than that. In 2012, I discovered an astonishing library of recordings from the annual meeting of elite conservative Christian philanthropists whose community and yearly event is known, simply, as “The Gathering”.

The Gathering community now dispenses over $1 billion dollars a year to steer America, and the world, towards a “biblical” future. The event was launched from a 1985 meeting of several “friends” at the Arlington, VA mansion known as “The Cedars” that’s owned and operated by the group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast : The Fellowship.

This secretive evangelical network, whose members refer to themselves as a “Christian mafia”, also looks to the fanatical dedication that 20th Century tyrants — such as Hitler, Lenin, and Mao — were able to inspire. Longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe has espoused such sentiments, and Fellowship heavyweight Rick Warren has done that too.

But even among the elites of the Fellowship and its financial wing, the DeVoses are special.

I learned that from listening to their 2001 appearance at The Gathering, audio of which I posted in 2015 and that was subsequently picked up in a vastly influential Politico story, which showcased something Betsy DeVos said at The Gathering 2001 — that public education could “advance God’s kingdom”.

What strikes me now, about that 2001 audio from The Gathering is that the DeVos/Prince power couple were, even among the assembled multimillionaires and billionaires, regarded as movement royalty. And, there’s reason.

Prince family money helped launch the Family Research Council. Amway founder and DeVos patriarch Richard DeVos funded Gospel films, which produced anti-abortion films that helped jump start the anti-abortion movement which has played a major role mobilizing the religious right as a political force, and he twice served as president of the shadowy Council for National Policy, which brings together activists of the religious right with donors who fund their projects.

And, perhaps more importantly, the DeVoses didn’t merely help create the rising religious right — they pioneered a stealth approach which has now come to characterize the movement. The DeVoses have taken on strategic secular objectives which, if achieved, make the eventual triumph of the religious right, it’s dominance of American politics, all-but inevitable.

Along with Koch brothers operatives, Dick DeVos was part of the cabal which, since 2007, had schemed to implement a “right to work” bill in Michigan. The plot succeeded in 2012. Taking down unions has long been a shared Koch/religious right objective.

Public education is an even bigger target, and there the DeVoses have led the way. In the 2000 election, they backed school voucher ballot initiatives in California and Michigan. Both were decisively rejected by voters.

So, the DeVoses decided to try a sneakier approach. In a 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Dick DeVos outlined a stealth plan to foster charter school initiatives on a state-by-state basis, with state-level organizations that would appear to be local initiatives.

While such efforts might seem secular, they have diverted a growing stream of public money to private religious schools and charter schools, some of which have a covert religious agenda.

Along the way, as they have begin to enter national politics, Dick and Betsy DeVos have over the last decade and a half shifted the funding pattern of their namesake family foundation — away from overt culture war concerns.

But meanwhile, Betsy also sat on the board of the Prince Foundation which doled out substantial funding to the hard religious right. And, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation’s board interlocks tightly with the board of the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which also heavily funds the religious right.

In short, Betsy and Dick DeVos have become experts in stealth politics, and the reporters and journalists who cover them almost inevitably lack the critical discernment but also the background knowledge to cut through the ruse.

If — or when — Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary Education, don’t expect anything blunt. She will not proclaim, a Christian flag waving behind her, the advent of a new regime of Christian fundamentalist madrassas.

She will announce a plan that will appear secular and, to many, even reasonable. But, a few years down, the end result may not seem reasonable at all, and will align with the objectives of initiatives such as the Student Statesmanship Institute : reclaiming America for Christ or, at least, the DeVos version of Christ — a Christ of coercive social legislation and radical privatization, bent on smashing the middle class and putting America under the boot-heel of a thousand sanctimonious Rick Santorums.

BREAKING Betsy DeVos Funded Creationist, Anti-Gay Teen Politics Camp. For Decades.

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Tuesday January 24, 2017 · 11:03 AM PST

2017/01/24 · 11:03

YouTube Video

Here’s a story that will be breaking this week in advance of the January 31st final vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Education.

If you feel so moved, please share this video !

Several hundred thousand public school teachers across the nation really need to see it, because Betsy DeVos may be coming for their jobs.

Forewarned is forearmed — despite blandishments from the right leaning spectrum of American media, the real Betsy DeVos is far more radical than the American public knows.

So, Betsy and Dick DeVos, for decades, have supported an educational venture that looks to the prowess of Hitler and Lenin at mobilizing youth and aspires to raise up a crop of “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation” ?

Who could have imagined ?

Their foundation 990 tax forms show that Betsy and Dick DeVos’ financial support for the Student Statesmanship Institute goes back as far as the early 1990s, and in 1993 Betsy was honorary chair for the first fundraiser of the nonprofit that runs SSI. She was listed on the SSI advisory board up into 2015.

One way to look at SSI is as a DeVos funded and supported educational venture which is possibly even more renegade, in terms of being wholly unaccountable, than the “wild west” charter school regime inflicted upon the state of Michigan, and the city of Detroit, by Betsy DeVos’ school privatization steamroller machine.

SSI promotes a literal interpretation of the Bible, and all that tends to flow from it — creationism, anti-LGBT ideology, and so on, the whole raft of positions typically associated with the politicized Christian right. But SSI also pushes the sort of radical privatization, pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda associated with the Koch brothers.

No surprise there — Amway patriarch Richard DeVos can be found at Koch brothers events sitting alongside the two brothers, looking much at ease and very much their equal.

As researcher Rachel Tabachnick described in a landmark 2011 Talk2action.org story, the DeVos and Prince families, both of which have financially supported SSI, are “at Intersection of Radical Free Market Privatizers and Religious Right”.

It’s really the worst of both worlds, and the combined package looks suspiciously close to what’s long been envisioned by the Christian Reconstructionism movement, which has long aspired to smash American public education.

By 2012, the conjoined DeVos and Prince families were doling out over $46,000,000 in philanthropic largesse, and the two dynasties have played a whopping and almost wholly overlooked role in rearing up the modern Christian right, a movement now taking control of entire sectors of the federal government, a movement that now dominates Congress and the Senate.

Back in 2011, mainstream media pundits were pooh-poohing something called “dominionism”. Well, its day has arrived. Fasten your seat belt.

Trump Education Secretary Pick Betsy DeVos Wanted To "Advance God's Kingdom" Through School "Reform"

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Saturday December 03, 2016 · 11:28 AM PST

2016/12/03 · 11:28

(UPDATE: the Huffington Post has now picked up this story as well)

A new Politico story showcases disturbing aspects from a 2001 audio recording from an appearance that Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, and her husband Dick DeVos made at the annual conference of multimillionaire and billionaire conservative Christians known simply as The Gathering, an event characterized in a 2014 report from the LGBT rights nonprofit Truth Wins Out as “the religious right’s cash cow”.

As Politico summed the disturbing DeVos audio from The Gathering,

“The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to "advance God's Kingdom."

Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools.”

Relatively few news outlets have focused on the DeVos’s rather strong religious views. But the audio obtained by Politico makes clear that Betsy and Dick DeVos (who operate very much as a team, it’s quite clear from the audio recording) view school privatization as a means for advancing their version of the faith. As Politico’s Benjamin Wermund characterizes it,

“School choice, they say, leads to “greater Kingdom gain.” The two also lament that public schools have “displaced” the Church as the center of communities, and they cite school choice as a way to reverse that troubling trend.”

In short, for the DeVos’s, school “reform” is meant to roll back secularization and erode church-state separation.

Wermund’s story especially highlights the biblical imagery invoked by Betsy and Dick DeVos at their The Gathering appearance:

‘During the DeVos interview, the couple talks about a trip to Israel where they learned about a geographical region, called the Shephelah, where battles were fought between the Israelites and Philistines. Betsy DeVos then links this topic to education.

"It goes back to what I mentioned, the concept of really being active in the Shephelah of our culture — to impact our culture in ways that are not the traditional funding-the-Christian-organization route, but that really may have greater Kingdom gain in the long run by changing the way we approach things — in this case, the system of education in the country," she says.

Using an anecdote about pig remains found on archaeological digs in the Shephelah, the couple compares their work in education reform to the long-ago battles waged in that region. Pigs are not kosher, Dick DeVos says, so you could tell where the Jewish people influenced what the couple call "pagan" communities, because “the pig bones were gone.”

"We could run away and just go back up in the hills and live very safely and very comfortably — or are we going to exist in the Shephelah and try to impact the view of the community around us with the ideas we believe are more powerful ideas of a better way to live one’s life and a more meaningful and a more rewarding way to live one’s life as a Christian?" Dick DeVos says. "Our job is to figure out in the contemporary context — how do we get the pig bones out of our culture?" ‘

As noted in the linked 2014 report on The Gathering from Truth Wins Out, the event known as The Gathering was launched following a 1985 meeting at the Arlington, VA mansion known as “The Cedars” that’s owned by the Fellowship, which organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast.

Longtime head of The Fellowship Doug Coe has praised (as showcased in video aired in a 2007 NBC News report) the dedication of the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.

Another prominent Fellowship member, Saddleback Church head and Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren, has also encouraged Christians to be as dedicated as the followers of totalitarian leaders such as Adolf Hitler. Over the years, Warren has been one of the more frequent featured speakers at The Gathering.

The Fellowship was the subject of two books (published in 2008 and 2010 — see this NPR interview) by journalist Jeff Sharlet, who characterized the secretive, Washington, DC-based neo-fundamentalist network as a “fundamentalist threat to American democracy”.

Trump To Appear With Alex Jones, Who Warns that Shape-Shifting Reptilian Aliens Rule The World ?

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Tuesday November 15, 2016 · 12:25 PM PST

2016/11/15 · 12:25

Juice boxes are turning children gay, and the LGBT rights movement is on a warpath to exterminate humanity. Shape-shifting reptilian aliens in humanoid form control the world and are out to get Donald Trump ! Barack Obama is a demon ! Hilllary Clinton is a “damn demon” who smells “like rotting meat”.

All that, and more, courtesy of Alex Jones’ Internet conspiracy channel Infowars.

Back in December 2015, Donald Trump appeared on Infowars and praised Jones — “Your reputation is amazing”, declared Trump.

Now, in a video posted November 11th, 2016, Alex Jones has informed his followers that Donald Trump has recently been in phone touch with Jones and has promised to appear on Infowars sometime in the next few weeks.

YouTube Video

So far, NBC, Fox, Huffington Post, and other media venues are merely reporting on Alex Jones’ claim, of a phone call from Trump. But Slate’s Jeremy Stahl is running with the full thing — “Donald Trump Thanks Alex Jones, Set To Appear On His Show Again”

Time will tell.

Another Day, Another Racist Death Threat. Denounce the Hate, Mr. Trump

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Tuesday November 15, 2016 · 9:08 AM PST

2016/11/15 · 09:08

You can see the scrawled and typewritten death threats here on Twitter. Local police are investigating. “WE WILL KILL THEM”, warned the first note. The second declared,

“We tolerated the latinos now you are going total black. This trash belong to Dorchester. We have reclaimed our country back by selecting Trump and you are messing up everything. Our kids and our pets are scared to death.”

This is not happening, however, in the deep South. It’s happening in the town of Natick, very close to Boston, MA.

Donald Trump has just chosen, as a top adviser, a figure associated with the promotion of white nationalism, Stephen Bannon. That sends exactly the wrong message at precisely the wrong time.

As the New York Times editorial board wrote on November 10th, in an op-ed titled “Denounce the Hate, Mr. Trump”,

“In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump pledged that he “will be president for all Americans,” and he asked those who did not support him “for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”�

Here’s some guidance right off the bat, Mr. President-elect: Those sentiments will have more force if you immediately and unequivocally repudiate the outpouring of racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks being associated with your name. Do this in a personal plea to people who supported your candidacy. Tell them this is not what you stand for, nor is it what your new administration will tolerate.”

Denounce the hate, president-elect Trump. Now.

Hey Garrison Keillor, That's The Height of Smug, Ignorant Liberal Arrogance

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Thursday November 10, 2016 · 7:16 AM PST

2016/11/10 · 07:16

Prairie Home Companion legend Garrison Keillor is ready, he’s declared, to retreat to a safely cloistered spot from which to cultivate heirloom tomatoes for four years, watching and cackling as Donald Trump makes a spectacular mess of America.

But first, there are those poor and working class whites who need a good lesson, especially in values. They’re poor, see, because they have bad values. Back during the Reagan years, I recall, conservatives frequently said that about African-Americans. It was just as vicious back then as now.

In my opinion, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of United States may well prove an epic disaster. Sure. Who’s to blame ? It’s the white working class, according to Keillor, whose Wednesday Washington Post op-ed suggests that poor whites can’t claw their way out of encroaching poverty because they have bad values.

Now, the votes of whites with a high school education or less did help Donald Trump win the presidency. It’s also a simple and bleak fact that if in 2016 as many Democratic Party voters had gone to the polls as in 2012, let alone 2008, we’d now be anticipating the inauguration of Hillary Clinton.

But why reflect on the possible reasons why Democratic turnout was so lackluster when there’s a convenient, downtrodden, vilified societal group at hand to blame it on ?

Read it, and weep :

“Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the land where the waitress’s kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.”

This is the height of smug, ignorant liberal arrogance, and it's essentially the same attack that’s been deployed by Republicans and from the right in past decades to attack poor African-Americans in the inner cities ; they don’t have the cultural values which enabled other Americans to work their way up the economic ladder. They’re poor because they’re un-disciplined, ignorant, and lazy.

I happen, by the way, to know public school teachers who work in Massachusetts, in areas both rural and urban, who assure me that Keillor’s “plugged into electronics day and night” stereotype applies equally to poor whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, and pretty much any selected impoverished ethnic group you might care to name.

Whether from a hard-right think tank like the Heritage Foundation or from a liberal icon such as Garrison Keillor, these sorts of attacks are often accompanied by examples of individuals from the targeted, vilified group who, through heroic effort, have themselves transcended, or enabled their offspring to transcend, their bleak circumstances.

So, we have Keillor’s “waitress and her husband” whose heroic parental sacrifices will enable their children to become physicists — or novelists like Keillor himself.

It does happen. But statistically speaking it doesn’t happen very often. Especially these days.

Study after study has revealed that income mobility in America today has plummeted to shockingly low levels. If your parents were affluent, you’ll likely grow up be wealthy. If poor, you’ll likely grow up to be poor.

There are lots and lots of reasons, but the upshot is simple — affluent parents tend to be well-educated, and the combination gives their offspring a powerful relative head start in life.

It’s all too convenient for rich, urban elites to vilify, from afar, poor whites for their racism, their tasteless displays of lowbrow culture, their anger.

This has been going on for decades — consider John Boorman’s 1972 movie Deliverance, in which four affluent city men from Atlanta on a white water rafting weekend in Appalachia are ruthlessly hunted, raped, and killed by toothless backwoods predators whose motivations are never made clear.

Now, to point out the underlying viciousness of Garrison Keillor’s Washington Post op-ed has nothing to do with justifying racism from any quarter. Are poor white Americans more likely to be racist ? Possibly, but that’s beside the point.

What’s especially ironic about Keillor’s perspective is that the same economic trends, notably deindustrialization, that have buffeted poor and working class whites have undercut poor and working class non-white minorities as well.

But rather than promote a narrative that explores how poor Americans of all ethnicities are victims of underlying structural changes unleashed by neo-liberal economic policies, Keillor chose to single out working class whites who, as it happens aren’t doing so well these days.

Indeed, I’m rather worried that Keillor’s smug, nasty screed will fall into the hands of those hard at work trying to incite further racist hatred among working class whites.

I’ve been studying such people quite intensively this year, and I can assure you they would instantly see the immense propaganda value, towards promoting further racial hatred, represented by Garrison Keillor’s Washington Post piece : a Washington newspaper, widely regarded as representing the political and social views of America’s liberal elites, prints an op-ed that blames poor whites for their own poverty.

How classy.

But as a counterpoint to Keillor's perspective, consider this widely circulated post, from Juan Cole, published the same day as Keillor’s op-ed :

“Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

One of the big reasons for this increased death rate has been increased use of opiods and other drugs, leading to overdoses, along with liver disease from drinking too much alcohol and increased suicide rates. The problems were especially acute among working class and rural whites with only high school or less, and later studies found that they extended to younger members of this social class in their 20s and 30s. Loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs was clearly a primary reason for this despair.

Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: “have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married.

The only comparison I can think of to this situation is what happened to Russians in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation had a population of nearly 150 million in 1990 and thereafter fell to about 144 million. The end of the Soviet Union caused their confidence in the future to collapse and the end of the old economic system created very high unemployment. They stopped having children and drank themselves to death.”

One of the takeaways from the 2016 election is that America is deeply polarized. Maybe, just maybe, we can work to develop explanations, about what’s really going on, which unite rather than divide. Otherwise, we’ll be playing right into the hands of Donald Trump and all he has come to represent during the 2016 election.

I think we can do better, and I think Garrison Keillor can do better. Let’s at least try.

Obama Just Suggested Trump Is Not Competent To Control America's Nuclear Weapons

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Sunday November 06, 2016 · 8:17 PM PST

2016/11/06 · 20:17

Commenting on the news that Donald Trump’s campaign staff have seized his Twitter account so Trump cannot possibly emit any more of his now infamous, self-sabotaging 3AM tweets, President Barack Obama told a crowd at a Hillary Clinton rally in Florida today,

“Apparently, his campaign has taken away his Twitter. In the last two days, they had so little confidence in his self-control, that they said, ‘We’re just going to take away your Twitter.’ ”

“Now, if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes. If somebody starts tweeting at 3 in the morning because ‘SNL’ made fun of you, then you can’t handle the nuclear codes.”

More in a moment — I have a very personal and historic connection to Obama’s observation which, regardless of what Vox.com says, is not a joke.

Yesterday, I received what I thought was likely a death-bed request from a friend of mine who is in his eighties, is an acknowledged expert in nuclear deterrence, and during the 1960s may have helped the US Navy wrest exclusive control of the nuclear franchise from Curtis LeMay and his fellow nuts in the Air Force.

My friend had called me from the hospital, after an unexpected emergency operation for a condition that could have quickly killed him. He called me still groggy from the procedure, but desperate to ask if I could possibly help him put out one last meme before voting on Tuesday.

George’s meme was exactly what president Obama just suggested — Donald Trump does not posses the temperament required for a political leader with the power to visit thermonuclear devastation upon most of the Earth.

More in a few minutes, after I take out the dog…

My friend George E. Lowe is, among other things, author of the 1964 book The Age Of Deterrence, published by Little, Brown (I have a copy, and have read it.) It concerned nuclear deterrence theory. You can read some of Lowe’s writing on the subject here in this 1970 article of his published by what was then a quite significant venue, Virginia Quarterly Review.

George Lowe claims to have been in one or more secret high-level US Navy cabals which considered the US Air Force’s exclusive control of US nuclear weapons, during the 1950s and early 1960s under Air Force head Curtis LeMay, to have been highly dangerous.

Lowe, in his several books published after his retirement, has described being involved in an extraordinary secret Navy political and PR campaign, headed by several US Navy Admirals including Senator John McCain’s father and The Doors singer Jim Morrison’s father as well, against the Air Force.

According to Lowe, the cabal’s activities included leaking material which wound up in Stanley Kubrick’s legendary film Dr. Strangelove, as well as popular novels of the day that explored the ramifications of nuclear war and, to say the least, did not reflect well on the air force.

During the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, Curtis LeMay did his best to provoke the crisis. John F. Kennedy’s cooler head prevailed. We now know that LeMay’s instincts would have led to the nuclear devastation of major swaths of both the Eastern US and Russia. Or possibly worse.

John F. Kennedy was far from a perfect person. But during those fateful days in 1963 when Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were ready to launch against the Southeastern US, and US B-52 bombers were ready to begin carpet combing the Soviet Union with thermonuclear ordinance, one man’s temperament was crucial towards to prevention of nuclear holocaust.

That temperament was John F. Kennedy’s.

Donald Trump, who as the 2016 Republican Party Presidential nominee cannot manage even a twitter account, is no John F. Kennedy.

Obama on Trump : "if somebody can’t handle a TWITTER ACCOUNT, they can’t handle the NUCLEAR CODES"

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Sunday November 06, 2016 · 6:27 PM PST

2016/11/06 · 18:27

“Apparently, his campaign has taken away his Twitter. In the last two days, they had so little confidence in his self-control, that they said, ‘We’re just going to take away your Twitter.’ ”

“Now, if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes. If somebody starts tweeting at 3 in the morning because ‘SNL’ made fun of you, then you can’t handle the nuclear codes.”

More in a moment — I have a very personal and historic connection to Obama’s observation which, regardless of what Vox.com says, is not a joke.

More in a few minutes, after I take out the dog…

That temperament was John F. Kennedy’s.

Donald Trump, who as the 2016 Republican Party Presidential nominee cannot manage even a twitter account, is no John F. Kennedy.

Trump Campaign Using Pro-Ethnic Cleansing White Supremacist Group For GOTV Push

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Thursday November 03, 2016 · 5:55 PM PDT

2016/11/03 · 17:55

This is news.

The November 2nd, 2016 Politico story White nationalists plot Election Day show of force : KKK, neo-Nazis and militias plan to monitor urban polling places and suppress the black vote concludes with a truly explosive, deeply disturbing revelation concerning the American Freedom Party and the Trump campaign.

As Ben Schreckinger’s Politico story describes,

“William Johnson, chairman of the American Freedom Party and an advocate of deporting nonwhites from the United States, said his party members are working through Trump’s operation rather than organizing their own efforts.

“We have some of our members that are doing poll watching, but they’re not doing it as American Freedom Party members,” he said. “They’re doing it through the Trump campaign.”

“We have a lot of people that are involved with the get-out-the-vote through the various Trump organizations,” said the Los Angeles-based Johnson, who added that the party’s California members are focused on aiding the Trump campaign in Nevada.”

The AFP is a white supremacist political party with deep neo-Nazi roots that supports ethnic cleansing, denies historic genocidal violence against Native Americans, and promotes Holocaust denial.

The AFP, which calls Donald Trump it’s “great white hope”, sells a novel about a coming race war in America that will lead to mass ethnic cleansing.

Will the Trump campaign deny it ?

The American Freedom Party might well be the most toxic political entity in America today. It’s a fetid miasma that represents a confluence of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and anti-Semitic currents on the American far-right.

Every one of the six leaders of the AFP has his own, uniquely horrible profile on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center :

William Daniel Johnson

Paul Fromm

Kevin B. MacDonald

Tom Sunic

James Kelso

James Edwards

A seasoned corporate lawyer, William D. Johnson's past positions have included a 1985 proposal to deport all American citizens of child-bearing age who had an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood” or more than 1/8 "Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood". The Politico story suggests Johnson still harbors that ambition.

But there’s good circumstantial evidence to support Johnson’s claims, that his AFP is working directly with the Trump campaign. I have detailed various aspects of that case in a few recent posts here on the Daily Kos :

Trump Advisors Flock To Radio Network That Ran David Duke Fundraiser

Trump links to white supremacist group that helped inspire Dylan Roof Massacre

And earlier on the Huffington Post :

Trump Campaign Tied To Second Leader of White Nationalist Party

From Inside RNC, White Nationalist Radio Broadcasts Call For Execution of Clinton

As I detail in that first Huffington Post story, the trail goes back as far as April 2016, when the Trump campaign granted American Freedom Party director James Edwards VIP press credentials so that Edwards could broadcast his wildly racist Political Cesspool radio show from inside a Memphis Trump rally.

Edwards then participated in a March 1st., 2016 radio show interview with Donald Trump, Jr., on the Liberty Roundtable talk radio show. In July, James Edwards joined Liberty Roundtable show host Sam Bushman at the 2016 Republican National Convention (see second Huffington Post story) from where Bushman was live-broadcasting his Liberty Roundtable show.

As I describe in my second linked Daily Kos story, James Edwards is also a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which “opposes all efforts to mix the races” and has been credited by Time, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other major media venues with having helped inspire Dylann Roof’s Summer 2015 mass-murder of nine African-American members of a Charleston, South Carolina church prayer group, in what Roof has described as an attempt to trigger a race war.

In my two linked Daily Kos stories, I cover the involvement of Sam Bushman and James Edwards in pro-Trump robocalls and radio ads aired in 2016 by the American Freedom Party.

White Supremacist, neo-Nazi Group Says It's Working Within The Trump Campaign

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Thursday November 03, 2016 · 11:15 AM PDT

2016/11/03 · 11:15

The AFP is a white supremacist political party with deep neo-Nazi roots that denies historic genocidal violence against Native Americans but promotes Holocaust denial. The AFP sells a novel about a coming race war in America that will lead to mass ethnic cleansing, and calls Donald Trump it’s “great white hope”.

As Ben Schreckinger’s Politico story describes,

“William Johnson, chairman of the American Freedom Party and an advocate of deporting nonwhites from the United States, said his party members are working through Trump’s operation rather than organizing their own efforts.

“We have some of our members that are doing poll watching, but they’re not doing it as American Freedom Party members,” he said. “They’re doing it through the Trump campaign.”

“We have a lot of people that are involved with the get-out-the-vote through the various Trump organizations,” said the Los Angeles-based Johnson, who added that the party’s California members are focused on aiding the Trump campaign in Nevada.”

Will the Trump campaign deny it ? The American Freedom Party might well be the most toxic political entity in America today. It’s a fetid miasma that represents a confluence of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and anti-Semitic currents on the American far-right.

Every one of the six leaders of the AFP has his own, uniquely horrible profile on the wesbsite of the Southern Poverty Law Center :

William Daniel Johnson

Paul Fromm

Kevin B. MacDonald

Tom Sunic

James Kelso

James Edwards

Trump Advisors Flock To Radio Network That Ran David Duke Fundraiser

Trump links to white supremacist group that helped inspire Dylan Roof Massacre

And earlier on the Huffington Post :

Trump Campaign Tied To Second Leader of White Nationalist Party

From Inside RNC, White Nationalist Radio Broadcasts Call For Execution of Clinton

In my two linked Daily Kos stories, I cover the involvement of Sam Bushman and James Edwards in pro-Trump robocalls and radio ads aired in 2016 by the American Freedom Party.

Trump Advisers Flock To Radio Network That Ran David Duke Fundraiser

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Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday November 03, 2016 · 8:54 AM PDT

2016/11/03 · 08:54

Yesterday, students at the historically all black Dillard University in New Orleans were pepper sprayed by police while protesting the presence of Louisiana candidate and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke at a Dillard University-hosted candidates’ debate (from which Dillard students and most of the public were excluded.)

Meanwhile, to no controversy whatsoever, Trump for president campaign advisers and surrogates have been flocking to appear on a radio network that recently aired a live fundraiser for David Duke’s political campaign.

How directly has the Trump campaign courted the sharp edge of the white supremacist movement ? Much more directly than mainstream media, or even watchdog groups tasked with studying such things, have noticed.

Starting in early September, I began to track an extraordinary evolving pattern. Top Trump campaign advisers and surrogates were appearing, one after another, as featured guests on a somewhat obscure far-right talk radio show, the Liberty Roundtable, that’s syndicated on the tiny Liberty News Radio network broadcast by less than a dozen stations, most operating at a thousand watts or less, across the nation.

Eric Trump. Trump for President co-chair Sam Clovis. Trump national security adviser and former CIA director James Woolsey. On and on.

It was an extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable roster. Why would these Trump advisers and surrogates bother with such a puny venue given that they frequently appear on media venues that can reach millions ?

As minor as Liberty News Radio was, many white supremacists and white nationalists across America may well have noticed. Here are a few reasons why :

For one thing, even though Liberty Roundtable host Sam Bushman frequently and vehemently denies being racist, he has nonetheless enthusiastically taken credit for producing a series of racist pro-Trump robocalls aired in early 2016, in various U.S. states prior to their GOP primaries, by the white supremacist, neo-Nazi linked American Freedom Party that represents the political cutting edge, in America today, of the racist right.

And, just this August, Bushman’s Liberty News Radio network aired an impromptu fundraiser for an historic icon of the racist right, David Duke.

On August 27th, 2016, in the third 1-hour segment, James Edwards’ Political Cesspool radio show featured white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who is currently running in the state of Louisiana for a U.S. Senate seat. Edwards warmly introduced Duke, as a friend of over decade, and attested, “there is a huge difference between the actual man and how he is presented in the media”.

At 20:00 into the one-hour segment, Duke began to solicit donations to his political campaign via his website www.dukeforsenate.com. “Is that alright ?”, asked Duke. “That is absolutely alright,” enthused Edwards, “I’m glad you did that because if you didn’t take the opportunity I would have asked you to do it.”

It was a little telethon for race hate, courtesy of Liberty News Radio, which is owned and operated by blind Mormon radio entrepreneur Sam Bushman.

Bushman’s small but national radio network airs from Oregon to Florida on less than a dozen, mainly AM, radio stations most of which operate at 1,000 watts of power or less. LNR’s flagship, the Christian 1600 AM WMQM, broadcasts out of Lakeland, Tennessee (near Memphis) during the day with 50,000 watts of power.

One apt word to describe the relationship between the Liberty Roundtable show and the Political Cesspool show might be “conjoined”. Sam Bushman frequently appears as a guest on the Political Cesspool, and James Edwards frequently appears as a guest on the Liberty Roundtable.

Indeed, the two sometimes even guest-host each others’ shows. It goes on. Ads for James Edwards bold apologetic for racism, his 2010 book “Racism, Schmacism : How Liberals Use the "R" Word to Push the Obama Agenda”, frequently appear on Sam Bushman’s Liberty Roundtable show.

In July, Bushman and Edwards broadcast together live from the Republican National Convention. In one radio segment (which did not feature Edwards), Bushman conducted an interview with New Hampshire state representative Al Baldasaro, who called for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to be executed, for alleged treason.

Most recently, in October 2016, Edwards and Bushman collaborated in producing a pro-Trump political ad for the white supremacist American Freedom Party — which promotes Holocaust denial, sells a novel about a coming race war in America that will lead to mass ethnic cleansing, and calls Donald Trump it’s “great white hope”.

The Trump campaign’s patronage of the Liberty News Radio network began back on March 1st. when Donald Trump, Jr. appeared as a featured guest on the Liberty Roundtable, another Liberty News Radio flagship talk radio show.

Joining regular Liberty Roundtable host Sam Bushman during the interview was James Edwards. After the Trump, Jr. interview, Bushman boasted of producing a series of American Freedom Party pro-Trump robocall messages that aired throughout early 2016 in U.S. states prior to their GOP primaries.

One of the messages warned of a “gradual genocide against the white race” and urged citizens to vote for Donald Trump.

Another AFP robocall message featured white nationalist leader Jared Taylor, who has served as a spokesperson for the Council of Conservative Citizens and maintains that African-Americans are genetically predisposed to criminal behavior. In the robocall Taylor stated,

“We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

National media noticed Edwards’ presence at the March 1st. interview because of his Political Cesspool radio show that frequently features white nationalists and white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, and neo-Confederate Southern secessionists.

But Edwards was also a national board member of the wildly racist Council of Conservative Citizens which “opposes all efforts to mix the races” and whose website, which showcases violent black-on-white crime, has been widely credited (see 1,2,3) with helping inspire Dylann Roof’s Summer 2015 slaying of nine African-American members of a Charleston, South Carolina church prayer group, an act Roof hoped would trigger a race war.

Four days before Donald Trump, Jr.’s appearance on the Liberty Roundtable, the show had as its featured guest another Council of Conservative Citizens board member, Keith Alexander, now a regular co-host on James Edwards’ Political Cesspool.

After Dylann Roof’s Summer 2015 massacre, national mainstream media noticed the apparent role that the Council of Conservative Citizens had played in shaping Roof’s virulently hateful racial outlook.

Channel 3 News, a Memphis, Tennessee NBC affiliate station, tracked down three local CofCC board members for comment. One was Keith Alexander. Another was CofCC board member James Edwards, who vehemently denied any responsibility, stating,

“To say that there is a "link" because he once visited the website reeks of Soviet-era smear tactics. The C of CC cannot reasonably be held accountable for the psychotic reaction this deranged individual had in response to reading truthful statements regarding interracial crime.”

James Edwards’ Political Cesspool radio show has been financially sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens and endorsed by the CofCC as an official outlet for its views.

Below is a list of current and former Trump campaign advisers and surrogates who have appeared on the Liberty Roundtable show in 2016 :

March 1st, Donald Trump, Jr. (link)

July 20th, Trump Veterans co-chair and NH State Representative Al Badasaro, live from 2016 Republican National Convention (link)

July 22nd, Trump endorser U.S. Congressman Tom Marino, live from 2016 RNC (link)

September 2nd, Trump campaign trade adviser Curtis Ellis (link)

September 16th, Trump campaign adviser Lee Spieckerman (link)

September 19th, Trump For President National Co-Chair and Senior Policy Adviser Sam Clovis (link)

September 22nd, Trump campaign surrogate and spokeswoman Scottie Nell Hughes (link)

September 23rd, Trump campaign adviser, NH State Representative Al Baldasaro (link)

September 26th, Trump Hispanic Council Member/Advisor Steve Cortes (link)

September 28th, Trump economy adviser Stephen Moore (link)

October 3rd, former Trump campaign adviser and Trump PAC head Roger Stone (link)

October 4th, Trump national security campaign adviser former CIA head James Woolsey (link)

October 6th, Eric Trump (link)

October 20th, Roger Stone (link)

October 25th (first hour), Texas Agriculture Commissioner and Trump Campaign agriculture adviser Sid Miller (link)

October 25th (second hour), Milwaukee Sheriff, Trump campaign surrogate, and 2013 CSPOA Sheriff of the Year David A. Clarke (link)

October 31st, Trump spokeswoman Scottie Nell Hughes (link)

As described in this story, the Liberty Roundtable how has also functioned as a semi-official outlet for the anti-government Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) which played significant roles in the 2014 Summer standoff between armed militia supporters of Rancher Cliven Bundy and federal agents, and the early 2016 militia occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Up to June 26th, 2016, Sam Bushman was the CSPOA’s official Vice President of Operations, and CSPOA head Richard Mack makes frequent appearances on the Liberty Roundtable show to discuss business.

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