Speaking with Chris Matthews White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway made this outlandish claim.
“I bet there was very little coverage — I bet — I bet it's brand-new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country were radicalized and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” she said.
This has been shown to be totally false, but believe it or not, most Trump voters still think it’s true.
Asked by Public Policy Polling about Trump’s travel ban, which an appeals court refused to reinstate Thursday, 51 percent of Trump voters said “the Bowling Green Massacre shows why we need Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.” Only 23 percent disagreed with the statement.
For voters of the three other candidates in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, the percentages of those who agreed with the statement were all in the single digits.
I’ll bet that’s it’s brand new information that there actually was an attempted Bowling Green massacre, but it wasn’t attempted by anyone who believes in Islam, the actual targets were Muslims.
Sometimes we wonder why Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and tons of the regime’s surrogates repeatedly state delusional falsehoods. But the truth is this type of thing isn’t an accident or just a “mistake” as Conway attempted to claim it was.
This was no mistake, this was part of a plan as she’d said it twice before in interviews to TMZ and Cosmopolitan. She was not only wrong about the event, which didn’t happen and the fact that President Obama did not ban Iraqi refugees for 6 months in response to the this non-event and that what he actually did was improve the vetting process — which makes everything Trump is attempting now moot and redundant — she was also wrong that the media has been deliberately covering up islamic terrorist attacks in exactly the same way that White House resident Trump has done when he said this when talking to our military at McDill AFB.
TRUMP: You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.
When the Trump administration attempted to prove this point by producing a list of 78 terror attacks they claim didn’t receive coverage, that list included the Paris attacks, San Bernadino attack, Pulse Night Club attack, the Charlie Hebdo assault, the Nice and Berlin truck attacks, the Brussel airport all of which were heavily reported and none of which were committed by people from the 7 countries which were temporarily banned by Trump’s executive order.
“He felt as though members of the media don't always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered – that a protest will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage,” Mr Spicer said.
The White House said its list included terror attacks “executed or inspired by Isis” on Western targets between September 2014 and December.
“Networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did,” an official said. “This cannot be allowed to become the ‘new normal’.”
The White House did not specify which attacks on the list it claimed had gone under-reported, though the dossier included the massacres in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Berlin and the shooting in San Bernardino, all of which received widespread international coverage.
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The list appeared to have been assembled hastily using media reports and Isis propaganda. It included a number of spelling errors, with the words “attacker” and “attackers” misspelled multiple times along with the name San Bernardino, sparking anger from local politicians.
So this claim of media bias has been a complete and total fail when fully vetted, but as shown by the PPP poll not with Trump voters who fully received this message as it was intended. The point here is to discredit the media, to push the narrative that their reporting can’t be trusted — and the result is that by those who’ve place all their trust in Trump, that narrative works. These lies serve a purpose, driving a deeper and deeper wedge between some sections of the public and the media who are basically the primary method for determining what is fact and true and what isn’t.
When you’ve successfully knee-capped the fact checkers, facts don’t matter anymore. You can make up your own reality and within the bubble of those who side with you ideologically, that alt-reality is impermeable.
Another example: More than half of Trump supporters also think that “Pizzagate” was real also.
Late last year, PPP asked people if they believed in Pizzagate, the (not true) conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was connected to a (non-existent) child-sex ring run out of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant. Half of Trump voters thought that one was true, or could be true.
Their plan is clearly working for their intended audience. That’s problem number one, but problem number two is the fact that the media actually has grossly failed to report many terrorist attacks or attempted attacks when they are done by White nationalists and extremists.
As the nonexistent terrorist attack manufactured by Donald Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway makes headlines, we look at an actual threat by an extremist in Bowling Green, Ohio. In 2012, an FBI raid uncovered a full arsenal of assault rifles, firearms, body armor and ammunition amassed by the suspect, who prosecutors later determined was planning to carry out mass killings. But the suspect is not a radical Muslim. He is white supremacist Richard Schmidt, who federal authorities say was planning targeted attacks on African Americans and Jews. Investigators found a list of names and addresses of people to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio. Schmidt was sentenced to less than six years in prison after a federal judge said prosecutors had failed to adequately establish that he was a political terrorist. He is scheduled for release in February 2018. His case isn’t the only one involving terror threats by a white supremacist that received little coverage by mainstream media. On Monday, the trial of Christian minister Robert Doggart began in Tennessee federal district court. Undercover FBI agents allege that Doggart was plotting to travel to upstate New York to kill Muslims there, using explosives, an M-4 assault rifle and a machete. According to a federal investigation, Doggart saw himself as a religious "warrior" and wanted to kill Muslims to show his commitment to his Christian god. We speak with ProPublica’s A.C. Thompson, whose recent article is "When the Government Really Did Fear a Bowling Green Massacre—From a White Supremacist," and with Dean Obeidallah, a columnist for The Daily Beast writing about the Doggart case.
And this is what A.C. Thompson had to say.
Yeah, so, this was an absolutely incredible incident back in 2012. Richard Schmidt was a guy who had spent years in the Army. He had lost his Army service—he had been a reservist after his active duty—when he got into a street altercation and shot three people. He killed one of them, a man named Anthony Torres, spent 13 years in prison. When he got out of prison, he was banned from owning firearms. Despite that, he amassed a massive, massive arsenal—assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, 40,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor.
The federal government found out about his arsenal basically by accident. They were investigating a counterfeit sports good ring. Schmidt had a business selling sports memorabilia, and they traced packages of counterfeit NFL jerseys to his business in Bowling Green. When they got there, they found something that was much more worrisome than counterfeit goods. They found this huge arsenal, owned by a felon who was not allowed to have guns.
But more worrisome than that, what they found was a membership card for the National Alliance, a white supremacist group linked to more than 200 murders, and a indication that he was associated with the Vinlanders, a neo-Nazi skinhead group that’s active in Ohio and around the country. They believe that he was plotting to kill a series of people in Ohio and Michigan, videotape.
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The important thing is that what’s worrisome about the Bush administration—or the Trump administration, excuse me, is that there seems to be this intense focus on one type of terrorism, one type of crime, and that’s Islamic radical terrorism, when, in fact, we have a whole wave of sort of domestic, home-grown terrorists—white supremacists, white nationalists, extreme religious fundamentalists—who have been committing crimes in this country for decades. Slate documented nearly 40 of these types of terrorist incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could make a much, much longer list. In Ohio, around the same time that Mr. Schmidt was going to trial, there was another incident, where a gentleman was angry about something he saw on Fox News, went to a mosque in West Toledo, Ohio, set it on fire, did $1.4 million damage to the mosque. And that case, again, is another one that’s gotten very little attention.
As I previous posted earlier this week when responding to statements by Rep. Sean Duffy minimizing the threat of White terror, the Slate report included 31 incidents of White Nationalist Terrorism that produced 67 casualties, not including the Oklahoma City bombing which produced 168 of casualties Thompson claims are linked to the National Alliance because that group was founded by William Pierce, author of “The Turner Diaries” which directly inspired the attacks of Timothy McVeigh.
Explicitly genocidal in its ideology, NA materials call for the eradication of the Jews and other races — what a principal foundational document describes as "a temporary unpleasantness" — and the creation of an all-white homeland. Founded by William Pierce in 1970, the group produced assassins, bombers and bank robbers, among other things. Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries, was the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and many other acts of terror. After Pierce died unexpectedly in 2002, the group suffered several splits and ultimately lost most of its members.
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In all, NA members were connected to at least 14 violent crimes between 1984 and 2005, including bank robberies, shootouts with police and, in Florida, a plan to bomb the main approach to Disney World.
In 1984 a group calling itself “The Order” which was directly inspired by “The Turner Diaries” murdered radio host Alan Berg, so their history of violence is long. In recent years since the death of Pierce and the National Alliance has dwindled other groups, Alt-Right and Neo-Nazi have flourished. They have acted as groups and also inspired the lone wolf actors such as Dylann Storm Roof, the “Trainwreck” movie theater shooting, the Sikh Temple Shooting and the Quebec terror attack on a Muslim mosque that Fox initially claimed was committed by a Muslim when it was actually a White nationalist, one which the White House continues to downplay and ignore as shown by this testy back and forth between a reporter and Sean Spicer.
Q Earlier this week. You say the -- this is in context of Nordstrom and not about what she was counseled about, but about something she said to CNN earlier this week, is that the President doesn't comment on everything. And so I want to contrast the President’s repeated statements about Nordstrom with the lack of comments about some other things, including, for example, the attack on a Quebec mosque and other similar environments. Why is the President -- when he chooses to --
MR. SPICER: Do you -- hold on -- because you just brought that up. I literally stand at this podium and opened a briefing a couple days ago about the President expressing his condolences. I literally opened the briefing about it. So for you to sit there and say --
Q I was here.
MR. SPICER: I know. So why are you asking why he didn't do it when I literally stood here and did it?
Q The President’s statement --
MR. SPICER: I don't understand what you're asking.
Q Kellyanne’s comments were about that the President doesn't have time to tweet about everything.
MR. SPICER: Right.
Q He’s tweeting about this.
MR. SPICER: Right.
Q He’s not tweeting about something else.
MR. SPICER: I came out here and actually spoke about it and said the President spoke --
Q I'm talking about the President’s time.
MR. SPICER: What are you -- you're equating me addressing the nation here and a tweet? I don't -- that's the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.
Q I’m talking about an attack on Nordstrom on --
MR. SPICER: Okay, I’m done. This is silly. Okay, next.
Spicer’s real life behavior is so over the top it makes this not a parody, but an homage.
Still, the fact is that Trump hasn't said anything about the Quebec attack directly to the public in his own words, not even a single tweet. And also when Spicer addressed it he, like Fox, indicated that this was some form of Islamic foreign terrorism and that it somehow continued to justify Trump policies.
Q Thank you. In light of the tragedy that happened in Quebec City last week, which Prime Minister Trudeau is actually calling an act of terrorism, what is the President doing, what initiatives is he taking to make sure that that kind of homegrown -- because he was a Canadian citizen -- homegrown terrorism, homegrown violence doesn’t happen within our country?
MR. SPICER: Well, there’s a lot of things. Number one, he’s talked cyber -- I mean, he’s looking at it from every angle. I think the first thing is to make sure that we look at our borders. You’ve got to protect your own people first, then you’ve got to look at the cyber threats. I mean, so there is a holistic approach to both immigration and there’s a direct nexus between immigration and national security and personal security that he has to look at.
But then it’s a multi-tiered step. You look at the borders, you look at who we’re letting in, and you also look at what we’re doing internally with our intelligence agencies and the FBI that make sure that we’re looking at -- whether it’s the cyber threats that we face or other terrorist activities -- but making sure that we’re working with the NSA and the FBI to be ahead of the curve, if you will.
Q If I may, these are homegrown -- Oklahoma City was an American kid.
MR. SPICER: Sure.
Q Okay. That’s all. That’s what I’m asking.
MR. SPICER: That’s what I’m saying. But I think that, part of it is, looking at using the assets that we have here -- the NSA, the FBI -- looking at using the different agencies to see if we can get ahead of the curve and see things. And a lot of times, that’s been a very big issue, is getting ahead of the curve for when there are telltale signs, having the reporting systems up, working with the various agencies. But it’s a multi-effort process, if you will.
It’s really not. This had nothing to do with “our borders” the question was specifically about “domestic threats” and Spicer completely whiffed it. At no time has the Trump administration responded to domestic terror threats, let alone threats from white nationalists. They have even changed the name and focus of our counter-terrorism efforts.
The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.
Again, this is not a accidental mistake. This is part of a plan. Both the media and the Trump Administration have Islamic Terrorism on the brain. They’re obsessed with it when there has been a total of 81 people killed by Islamic terrorism since 9/11, contrasted with 67 killed by White extremist terrorism since Oklahoma City, and if you include simple mass murders by white people going back to 1981 that second number goes up to 561 as I noted when Van Jones posed the ironic hypothetical question of whether we should profile white people because of all of their mass murders.
However the reality is we aren’t going to hear a call for profiling of white Christian — sometimes supremacist or anti-goverment — men like the Planned Parenthood Shooter, or the Holocaust Museum Shooter, the Tucson Mall Shooter, the Charleston AME Church Shooter, the Texas Baptist Church Shooter, the Knoxville Church Shooter, the Sikh Temple Shooter, the Aurora Theater Shooter, the Columbine Shooters, the Las Vegas Cop Killers, the Sandy Hook Shooter, the Oslo Norway Mass Shooter, the Killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the Killer of Dr. David Gunn, the Killer of Dr. John Britton, or the Killer of Dr. George Tiller.
Because it would be ridiculous to try and predict what every white man, or every white Christian might happen to do or believe only because a small, but significant minority of them happen to be vicious murdering radical christian nutjob terrorists.
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From the perspective of the victims the totals are Asian Mass Shooters (6 incidents, 72 killed, 31 wounded), Black mass shooters, (12 incidents, 116 killed, 94 wounded), Muslim Mass Shooters (4 incidents, 81 killed, 106 wounded), White mass shooters (47 incidents, 561 killed, 628 wounded).
That’s not insignificant. White Terrorism is a problem, a national and worldwide problem. Yes, Islamic terrorism like the Paris attack that killed 130 people is a problem as well, but then again White extremist Andres Breivik killed 77 people in Norway all by himself. If 81 killed recently on U.S. soil by Muslim terrorists is bad, 67 recently killed by White terrorists isn’t that much better. If 130 killed in a single Islamic terrorist attack in Paris is bad overseas, 77 killed in a single anti-Muslim White extremist attack in Norway isn’t that much better.
If we need to upend our Constitution and nullify the rights of nearly a hundred thousand Muslims because of threat of Islamic terrorism, what exactly is it we’re going to do to combat the largely similar threat of White terrorism just as vigorously? We ignore the danger posed by these terrorist by turning a blind eye to them while hyperventilating and obsessively over-reacting to Islamic terrorism sprouting from countries that never attacked us on our soil, at our extreme peril.