Tag: Trump

Take Action: There’s nothing OK about the idea of a Muslim registry

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My colleague Khadija at MomsRising asks how we will explain this to our kids. How can I tell my son, who only has a dawning understanding of how our nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom, that our own government is preparing to single out people based on their faith or ethnicity and take away their rights?

As a Jewish family we are even more profoundly aware of how dangerous this kind of thinking is. The racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim fervor that has been inspired and embraced by Donald Trump is more than reminiscent of Weimar Germany when Hitler was able to step in to a leadership vacuum and wasn’t taken seriously by the people who thought he was crazy until it was much too late.

Please join me in signing this open letter to President Obama now to protect Muslim families from having to register.

 

(Photo: Dorothea Lange – American internees in mess hall line at Tanforan Assembly Center San Bruno CA April 29, 1942.)

“Aberrations”

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So many import and disturbing updates in Micah Sifry’s latest First Post at Civicist: Aberrations.

This point from Evan Osnos in The New Yorker probably freaked me out the most:

“Since Election Day, Trump has largely avoided receiving intelligence briefings, either because he doesn’t think it’s important that he receive them or because he just doesn’t care about them. George W. Bush, in the first months of 2001, ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. Only in our darkest imaginings can we wonder what warnings Trump is ignoring now.”

Also, I learned a new word “Americanism.”

The Real Voter Fraud: How Trump Used Facebook to Suppress Voting

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This is the story of how the Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.

Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald J. Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

Source: How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election – Startup Grind – Medium

Life at the intersection of hate: 2016-???

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Great blog post by my coworker Nadia Hussain on standing strong for her family in Trump’s America.
My family now lies at the intersection of hate — hatred of people of Latin/Hispanic background — like my husband, of Muslims like me, of my young son, who is both. The President-elect campaigned on the backs of my family by making sure people fear us. He calls Mexicans rapists and wants to deport 11 million mostly Latino undocumented people and build a wall.

Annals of Normalization

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My friend and mentor Micah Sifry wrote Annals of Normalization: The Trump-Times Meeting about the very real danger of normalizing Trump’s presidency, highlighting how The New York Times is literally incapable of reporting on him accurately.

So, in the first 15 minutes of Trump’s meeting with the Times’ top brass, he offers a completely unrehearsed word salad, reminiscing about things that didn’t happen. And then the meeting continues without anyone blinking and saying, excuse me sir, nothing you just said makes any sense.
This is Trump’s reality distortion field. And even on their home turf, surrounded by colleagues, no one at the Times had the gumption to really puncture it.

Pragmatism versus morality

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Trump: The Choice We Face, another insightful and important essay from Masha Gessen.

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged.

Armed with that knowledge, or burdened with that legacy, we have a slight chance of making better choices. As Trump torpedoes into the presidency, we need to shift from realist to moral reasoning. That would mean, at minimum, thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future. It is also a good idea to have a trusted friend capable of reminding you when you are about to lose your sense of right and wrong.

Trump: The Choice We Face | by Masha Gessen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Go, Durm!

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I’m incredibly proud to be a Durhamite. Most recently because of this powerful Letter to the People of the City of Durham from the Durham City Council.

The Durham City Council (1) condemns all hateful speech and violent action directed at Muslims, those perceived to be Muslims, immigrants and people of color; (2) categorically rejects any politician’s anti-Muslim rhetoric used as a tactic to influence voters or inflame hostilities; (3) commits to pursuing a policy agenda that affirms civil and human rights, and ensures that those targeted on the basis of race, religion or immigration status can turn to government without fear of recrimination; (4) reaffirms the value of a pluralistic society, the beauty of a culture composed of multiple cultures, and the inalienable right of every person to live and practice their faith without fear; and (5) pledges to work to make Durham a city that reflects those values in word and deed.

These are the values of the city of Durham. They are as true today as they were before the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and they will be just as true on the day he vacates that high office. Regardless of the policy agenda that our new president-elect decides to pursue, the city of Durham will remain as committed as ever to combatting hatred and bigotry in all forms, and to protecting and advancing the civil and human rights of all of the people of this city.