This is how we should respond to white nationalism rallies, like the one today in Boston. It’s called “Right against the Right” and was conceived by the Germans.
NY Times:
How to Make Fun of Nazis
The campaign, called Rechts Gegen Rechts — the Right Against the Right — turned the march into Germany’s “most involuntary walkathon.” For every meter the neo-Nazis marched, local residents and businesses pledged to donate 10 euros (then equivalent to about $12.50) to a program that helps people leave right-wing extremist groups, called EXIT Deutschland.
They turned the march into a mock sporting event. Someone stenciled onto the street “start,” a halfway mark and a finish line, as if it were a race. Colorful signs with silly slogans festooned the route. “If only the Führer knew!” read one. “Mein Mampf!” (my munch) read another that hung over a table of bananas. A sign at the end of the route thanked the marchers for their contribution to the anti-Nazi cause — €10,000 (close to $12,000). And someone showered the marchers with rainbow confetti at the finish line.
The approach has spread to several other German towns and one in Sweden (where it was billed as Nazis Against Nazis).
We can do it here. Meter by meter, or timed for speeches. Who wants to be the one to track the time, raise the money and donate to ADL and SPLC, on behalf of Richard Spencer, or whoever talks the longest?
TPM:
White Nationalists Are Feeling The Squeeze After Charlottesville Backlash
While President Donald Trump spent the week generating goodwill among the varied white nationalist groups that descended on Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, a wide swath of corporations, universities and localities were pushing back against them.
PayPal, Patreon, Facebook, Squarespace, Spotify, Google, GoDaddy, Texas A&M University, the University of Florida, Michigan State University, and a mountain resort in Colorado are among the companies removing white nationalists’ accounts and institutions canceling their planned events in the wake of violent street clashes that left three people dead and dozens injured on Saturday. By eliminating both the physical and virtual platforms that white nationalists use to promote their ideas, those companies and institutions have curtailed the avenues by which they could grow their reach
I can’t stress enough how important it is to preserve and defend norms. I am so conservative. Why aren’t more conservatives — uhm — more conservative?
WaPo:
Three fundraising giants decided to pull events from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach on Thursday, signaling a direct blowback to his business empire from his comments on Charlottesville’s racial unrest.
The American Cancer Society, a high-dollar client at the club since at least 2009, cited its “values and commitment to diversity” in a statement on its decision to move an upcoming fundraising gala. Another longtime Mar-a-Lago customer, the Cleveland Clinic, abruptly changed course on its winter event only days after saying it planned to continue doing business at Mar-a-Lago, a leading venue for charitable events in the posh resort town.
The American Friends of Magen David Adom, which raises money for Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, also said it would not hold its 2018 gala at the club “after considerable deliberation,” though it did not give a reason. The charity had one of Mar-a-Lago’s biggest events last season, with about 600 people in attendance.
Doesn’t stop there:
The American Red Cross, The Salvation Army and Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced on Friday they would hold their events planned for Mar-a-Lago elsewhere.
David A. Graham/Atlantic:
Donald Trump Is a Lame-Duck President
Just seven months into his presidency, Trump appears to have achieved a status usually reserved for the final months of a term.
Who knows when the lame-duck period began. Was it on January 21, when Trump’s administration tried to argue, against all evidence, that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history? Or the next day, when Kellyanne Conway introduced the world to “alternative facts”? Was it when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey? Was it the days-long slow reveal on Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016? Or did it come on Tuesday, when Trump stepped to a lectern in Trump Tower and delivered a strange de facto defense of white nationalism?
Whatever the turning point, thinking about Trump as a lame-duck president seems a better rubric for making sense of his administration than most. Consider the things that happen in a lame-duck period.
Eugene Robinson/WaPo:
Trump’s desperation is palpable. His approval ratings have slid perilously close to the danger zone where Republican officeholders no longer fear crossing him.
For titans of the business community, the tipping point came Wednesday. The chief executives of General Electric, Campbell Soup, Johnson & Johnson and 3M decided they could no longer serve on Trump’s advisory Manufacturing Council or his Strategy & Policy Forum.
Why stick around? Prospects that Trump can actually follow through on a business-friendly agenda, including tax reform, look increasingly dim. And Trump’s “many sides” reaction to Charlottesville wasn’t going over at all well with employees, customers or the executives themselves.
“Constructive economic and regulatory policies are not enough and will not matter if we do not address the divisions in our country,” JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon wrote in a message to his employees. “It is a leader’s role, in business or government, to bring people together, not tear them apart.”
Jen Margulies/Medium:
“…but is it good for the Jews?”
Practically a punchline in my generation, but it was still a question around the dinner table when we were growing up. (“We” being U.S. Ashkenazis, we descendants of the European Jewish survivors of the pogroms, the ghettos, or the Third Reich. Descendants of the ones who’d made it here in time. We who were all that was left. We remnants.) Underneath the laugh, maybe we meant it a little, or our parents did. Not as much as their parents did — their parents who more intimately knew themselves as Jewish and outsider here, politically and culturally — but there was still that edge of insecurity: How is this going to play out for our people? This political issue? This candidate? This policy? How will it impact our safety? Our survival? We kid, we kid: “the new citywide recycling program — is it good for the Jews?” but we don’t forget the question.
Nia-Malika Henderson/CNN:
What Trump understands about white identity politics
In an interview with the American Prospect, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon offers an important insight into why Democrats lost the election and why they're struggling with identity politics.
"The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
That is as succinct a reading of what happened in the 2016 as any. It is also a prediction about the enduring power of Trump's strategy. And Bannon may in fact be right -- Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, have made the same argument that the left focuses too much on identity politics, to its detriment.
Yet, in mentioning "identity politics" on the left, and suggesting that no such thing exists on the right, Bannon argues that it's the left alone that "is focused on race and identity," and not Trump.
He is wrong.
Erroll G. Southers/USA Today:
President Trump wants 'the facts' on right-wing extremism. Here they are.
To further satisfy the president’s sudden desire for fact, it is essential to understand that the road to the Charlottesville attack was not traveled in a night, nor even a decade. Since 9/11, the uptick in terrorism has not come from foreign threats. Instead it is owed to homegrown terrorists, with significant surges in attacks in 2008 and 2012, coinciding with the election and re-election of Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president.
The New America Foundation reports an almost 2-1 ratio of attacks by far-right extremists over Islamist extremists. The Anti-Defamation League reports that from 2007 to 2016, a diverse collection of extremists was responsible for the deaths of at least 372 people in the United States; 74% of these murders came at the hands of right wing extremists. These trends are accelerating, rapidly. In an eight-day period in May, for example, there was a string of violent extremist incidents that received little media attention and, unsurprisingly, no condemnation from the president.
Matthew Tully/USA Today:
Donald Trump: America’s horrible president
He has spit on our values, stood on the side of hatred and bigotry, and stained our country in ways that will be studied with sadness for centuries.
There’s not much left unsaid, and the words of a newspaper columnist in the middle of Indiana won’t add up to a hill of beans, but I have a little boy and a conscience and a love for the United States, and so there’s no way I can write about anything else but the damage being done by the madman running our country.
What to say? It’s all been said. But we should all make our voices heard.
So here goes.
Josh Marshall/TPM:
Trump will clearly, happily destroy the GOP if he feels the party has proven disloyal to him. Given what’s happened, it would be richly deserved. But Trump’s greatest powers are not as head of the GOP but as head of state of the country. He would happily destroy the country too to sate his own anguished feelings of betrayal. Sound hyperbolic? Why would the pattern be any different written on so large a canvass?
When I say I’m not surprised, I don’t say this pretending to any great insight. Lots of people aren’t surprised. Millions of people aren’t surprised. The best analogy I can think of is if you build the bomb and attach the fuse and light the fuse, the bomb will go off. The concussion is still loud and jarring. But the bomb was going to go off. That was inevitable when the bomb was built and the fuse lit.
Josh Blackman/Lawfare:
Traditionally, when referring to the president, a certain shorthand is used: the Obama administration, the Bush presidency, the Clinton White House, Reagan’s executive branch, etc. But these phrases are little more than euphemisms. The president, and not his subordinates, is selected by the national electorate. The president, and not his cabinet, is charged directly with the duty of faithful execution. If his underlings obstruct that duty, the president can typically remove—or order to have removed—that officer. In keeping with the concept of a “unitary” executive, the president’s cabinet, even those confirmed by the Senate, are at bottom extensions of his own power. When these officers speak, they are not speaking strictly for themselves, but on behalf of the president’s executive branch.
President Trump has disrupted this traditional account of Article II. Rather than serving as a “unitary” executive, Trump is something of a “solitary executive,” who is increasingly isolated within his own administration. This dynamic has manifested itself in two ways. First, the President often makes public statements (usually on Twitter) that conflict with positions his administration takes in court pleadings, Federal Register notices, or press releases. I refer to this phenomenon as presidential dissonance. Second, members of the government have publicly distanced themselves from several of the President’s impromptu missives. Call it presidential isolation. As President Trump continues to isolate himself from his own cabinet, this executive branch can only grind to a painful halt.