Reddit has banned a forum dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying users repeatedly violated its content policies.
"As
of September 12, r/greatawakening has been banned due to repeated
violations of the terms of our content policy,” a Reddit spokesperson
said in a statement to The Hill. “We are very clear in our site terms of
service that posting content that incites violence, disseminates
personal information, or harasses will get users and communities banned
from Reddit."
QAnon followers believe in a vague and far-reaching conspiracy theory that posits a “deep state” plot against resident Trump and a vast pedophile ring among elites.
Their theories are spurred by a poster or a group of posters that goes by the pseudonym “Q."
The
persona first posted on 4chan last year, claiming to be a high-ranking
security official in the Trump administration, and has led to groups
being created on Reddit as well as Facebook that boast thousands of
members.
Q has pushed the unsubstantiated theory Trump was
persuaded to run for president by military leaders and that together
Trump and the officials are planning the arrests of "deep state" members
in what Q and its followers call “The Storm.”
Q’s devotees
generally support President Trump. They’ve given Q’s posts a life of
their own, spinning off additional theories about who is behind Q and
what Q’s messages — which they call “crumbs” — mean.
The movement
initially began on the fringes of the Internet, on less trafficked
places like 4chan, but through Q theorists' ramped-up presence on Reddit
and Facebook, the conspiracy theories have gained a cult following
that’s spilled over into the real world.
Noticeable numbers of Trump supporters have shown up to his rallies clad in Q gear.
Reddit’s move to get rid of the critical Q group comes one day after it banned r/milliondollarextreme, according to BuzzFeed News,
a subreddit for the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme that is
popular with the alt-right. The subreddit was one of the most popular on
the site, sharing white supremacist and white nationalist content.
Over the past year, Reddit has taken more general steps to clean up its platform amid abuse and problematic content.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is apparently so afraid of getting a
primary challenge from the right in 2020 that she's willing to lose all
of the moderates, the independents, and the Democratic women who have
supported her in the past. In order to save her own career, she's
seemingly willing to sell out generations of women, of people of color,
of LGBTQ people with a vote to put a young, hyper-partisan extremist
Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. How far right has she swung? She's
giving exclusive interviews to outlets like Newsmax, which hosts a white supremacist radio show host on it's multimedia channel.
That interview, by the way, is so that she can blow off the efforts
of two political action committees in her state—the Maine People’s
Alliance and Mainers for Accountable Leadership—who've teamed up with
healthcare activist Ady Barkan to crowdfund a warchest for her 2020
Democratic opponent, whoever that might be. Collins and her press
secretary sniff that this is just like bribery and she is so far above
that that it won't make any difference and that she will "will make up
her mind based on the merits of the nomination."
Which is utterly laughable. On the merits, this guy has lied to the Senate. This one got glossed over with the stolen emails and everything else, but in a confirmation hearing in 2004
he actually told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) that "my background has not
been in partisan politics." This is the guy who almost single-handedly
created the Vince Foster was murdered by Hillary Clinton conspiracy
theory when he was working for Ken Starr, and who "argued internally for
the most-intrusive possible investigation and questioning of President
Clinton vis-a-vis the Lewinsky affair, and adopted a maximal view of
Clinton's legal liability and vulnerability to impeachment." He was part
of George W. Bush's legal team that bullied Bush into the White House
in Bush v. Gore. When Republicans decided to politicize the
most horrible thing one man had ever endured—Michael Schiavo's decision
to remove his brain dead wife Teri's life support—Kavanaugh woke Bush up in the middle of the night to intervene by signing "emergency" legislation.
He even lied to the Senate about being a partisan. It's a stain on
the Senate that they let him get away with it then, in 2004 when he was
Bush's right-hand man. And caught red-handed this time around as having
trafficked in stolen documents in order to advance Bush's partisan
agenda, Kavanaugh didn't even have the decency to apologize to Sens.
Durbin and Patrick Leahy whose emails were pilfered, or to the committee
for having misled them in the past.
It's a testament to just how unprincipled Collins has become, how
desperate to hold on to her Senate seat, that she is willing to
sacrifice everything up to and including her own dignity for Donald
Trump.
As if she's not going to get a challenge from the right in 2020
anyway.
The people of Maine need to call her on it. Directly. Every day. At
her office numbers: (207) 622-8414, (207) 945-0417, (207) 283-1101,
(207) 493-7873, (207) 784-6969, (207) 780-3575, (202) 224-2523. And
since she's ignoring calls, she needs to see them in person.
The
September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist
attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United
States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
The attacks killed
2,996 people, injured over 6,000 others, and caused at least $10
billion in infrastructure and property damage. Additional people died of
9/11-related cancer and respiratory diseases in the months and years
following the attacks.More at Wikipedia
Location:New York City, New York, U.S, Arlington County, Virginia, U.S, Stonycreek Township near, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Date:11, 2001, 8:46 a.m. – 10:28 a.m. (EDT)
Target:World Trade Center, (AA 11 and UA 175), The Pentagon (AA 77), White House or U.S. Capitol, (UA 93, failed)
URBANA, Ill. — Barack Obama went hard. Donald Trump hardly responded.
Friday was the day Republicans and Democrats and pretty much every
reporter and political obsessive have been dreaming of — the two who couldn’t be more different, who are both the throbbing
hearts of their own bases and the nightmare of the others’ — going head
to head.
Six weeks before the midterms that are existential for both of their
visions of the future, Obama unleashed for the first time with an
indictment of Trump and Republicans that stopped just short of calling
them traitors to the American ideal. Trump, who’s been swiping at Obama
on Twitter and other appearances almost every chance he gets and months
ago said Democrats who didn’t clap for his state of the union address
had committed treason, made a joke about sleeping through it. A few
hours later, he congratulated himself for the joke.
“That seems to be the quote of the day, by the way, which I sort of figured," Trump told donors in South Dakota.
Obama delivered some choice quotes of his own during his speech at
the University of Illinois. “How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are
bad?” he asked. Later, he called Trump’s Twitter feed “electronic
versions of bread and circuses.”
People close to Trump say he has long complained about the fawning
coverage and adulation that he believes Obama has received, even after
leaving the White House. The dynamic has only bolstered his deep-seated
belief that he’ll never be treated fairly or given credit in
establishment Washington.
But Trump also sees Obama as a much more formidable political
opponent than Hillary Clinton, the one he actually beat, and Trump’s
allies have privately worried that the 44th president could get in his
successor’s head. Obama, while publicly dismissive of Trump, has been
vexed by Trump for years, from the lies about his birth certificate, to
the deliberate attempts to undo his signature achievements, to worries
about how much he's responsible for the backlash that helped Trump get
elected.
To Obama, Democratic and Republican voters need to band together to
overlook their differences and stand up for America against Trump and
complicit elected Republicans. To Trump, voters need to see Democrats in
office as a threat to America because they won’t work with him.
Where Obama appealed to civic duty and common decency, Trump focused on the hard-line planks of his agenda.
“We have to be tough,” Trump said.
Obama leaned back from the podium at one point and marveled about how
every country in the world has signed on to the Paris climate accords,
except America, because Trump pulled back from the international
agreement. Trump bashed NATO, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and
all the other international norms that Obama holds dear.
Trump flew to North Dakota and South Dakota, where his party is
strongest, and gave another pair of speeches bragging about his record,
talked briefly about the candidates he was there to support and brought
them onto the stage.
Obama flew to central Illinois, spoke about American history and what
the country is supposed to stand for, then walked into a local coffee
shop and introduced his candidate one by one to the voters surprised to
see them there.
Asked what they had to say about Obama’s attacks on Trump — coming at
the end of head-exploding week in the middle of the darkest period of
his residency so far — multiple Trump White House aides and people
close to him said they didn’t want to get into it, letting the resident’s words speak for themselves.
Democrats have been flooding Obama’s office with requests for him to come see them.
Republicans, outside of the reddest states — which notably, include
several of those where Democratic incumbents are scrambling to hold on —
have been ducking questions on Trump for the entire year.
Trump’s public schedule on Friday put him at a disadvantage in terms
of hitting back at Obama. The resident had two speeches scheduled at
fundraising events in North Dakota and South Dakota, but neither were in
front of the massive crowds that reliably rev him up.
Still, “Isn’t this much more exciting than listening to President Obama?” Trump asked the crowd at his first event.
All three cable networks carried Obama’s speech live and in full,
including Fox News, which is often blaring in the resident’s cabin on
Air Force One, and replayed clips of Obama’s speech. CNN didn’t carry
Trump’s remarks in North Dakota live, MSNBC cut away quickly and even
Fox News went to commercial before the resident wrapped up. None of
them carried Trump’s full speech in South Dakota later in the day.
Trump was speaking to wealthy donors at the fundraising receptions.
Obama deliberately chose an auditorium full of students at the
University of Illinois for his address.
Trump, at one point, acknowledged he was speaking to a largelyaffluent
crowd, remarking that a coal mining executive he brought up on stage to
praise his efforts to revive the coal industry was likely rich.
“I signed his hat,” Trump joked. “The guy’s probably loaded and I’m signing hats.”
Trump riffed, as he always does. Obama spent the flight to Illinois
fiddling with a pen on a printed-out copy of the speech, changing words
and then changing them again.
Once it was done, Obama, per his custom, barely went off script —
though he said he couldn’t help himself from a digression to take credit
for the economy that Trump cites as his biggest success.
"Let’s just remember when this recovery started,” Obama said.
“Suddenly Republicans are saying, 'It's a miracle!' I have to remind
them that those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015, 2016."
Pushing back on that sensitive point was the only moment when Trump
brought out a pre-written document. He produced four sheets of paper
listing his accomplishments, running through them one-by-one in front of
the crowd to argue that he’d been the one who salvaged the economy.
“Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if
wrongly, fearful of change. More often it's manufactured by the powerful
and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and
keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep
their power and keep their privilege,” Obama said at one point. “It did
not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”
By the end of the day, Trump settled on this response to his
predecessor's critique: "If that doesn't get you out to vote for the
midterms, nothing will.”
Trump was trolled at his own rally! Cenk Uygur, Brett Erlich, Brooke
Thomas, and John Iadarola, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
resident Donald Trump’s own tongue seemed to be working to thwart him at a rally in Montana.
resident Donald Trump appeared to have slurred the word "anonymous"
twice during his rally in Billings, Montana on Thursday (Sept. 6). The
Republican suggested the anonymous New York Time op-ed was written by a
woman during his rally in Billings, Montana.
Roland Martin took Fox Business' Lou Dobbs to task for his comments
about Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign and for claiming that police
brutality is not an issue in America.
Dobbs said, "This is Nike endorsing the Kaepernick message which is that
police brutally exists in wanton measure across this country. And it
emphatically...does not. It is a disgrace, to me, that anyone would give
that message credence."
-
Join us for #RolandMartinUnfiltered daily at 6PM EST! Visit www.RolandMartinUnfiltered.com to join the #BringTheFunk Fan Club to support independent fact-based journalism.
Charter members
will receive a shout out on Facebook and Twitter as well as perks and
exclusives.
The
NY Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed
essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official
in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job
would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay
anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our
readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our
vetting process here.
Resident Trump is facing a test to his residency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s
not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is
bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party
might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The
dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior
officials in his own administration are working diligently from within
to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To
be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the
administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have
already made America safer and more prosperous.
But
we believe our first duty is to this country, and the resident
continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our
republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The
root of the problem is the resident’s amorality. Anyone who works with
him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that
guide his decision making.
Although
he was elected as a Republican, the resident shows little affinity for
ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and
free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings.
At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In
addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the
“enemy of the people,” resident Trump’s impulses are generally
anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don’t
get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative
coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation,
historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But
these successes have come despite — not because of — the resident’s
leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and
ineffective.
From the White House to
executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will
privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s
comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from
his whims.
Meetings with him veer
off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his
impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally
reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There
is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one
minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently,
exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the resident
flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
The
erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung
heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast
as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great
lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they
are clearly not always successful.
It
may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that
there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And
we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track residency.
Take
foreign policy: In public and in private, resident Trump shows a
preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin
of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little
genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded
nations.
Astute observers have noted,
though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another
track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and
punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as
peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the resident was reluctant to expel
so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a
former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior
staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with
Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to
impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his
national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to
hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Given
the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the
cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex
process for removing the resident. But no one wanted to precipitate a
constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the
administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s
over.
The bigger concern is not what
Mr. Trump has done to the residency but rather what we as a nation have
allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our
discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter.
All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism
trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of
this great nation.
We may no longer
have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar
for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump
may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There
is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to
put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday
citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving
to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell says the Republicans' list of potential
Trump investigations concerns him because it shows "they know" that
Donald Trump is facing legal exposure. Rep. Swalwell also reacts to the resident's new "impeachment" claims.
A mass shooting at a Madden NFL 19 video game tournament in
Jacksonville, Florida, was caught on a Twitch live stream. The video
shows the moment shots rang out at the gaming bar Sunday afternoon.
According to reports, three people are dead, including the shooter, and
several others were wounded.
The shooting happened at the GLHF Game Bar at The Jacksonville Landing.
The gunman has been identified as 24 year old David Katz of Baltimore,
Maryland. Katz was in Jacksonville to play in the tournament and
witnesses say he was angry about losing.
CNN Suspends Paris Dennard After Past Sexual Misconduct Revealed
The network has suspended the GOP
contributor following a Washington Post report saying Arizona State
University fired him over harassment allegations.
“We are aware of reports of accusations against Paris Dennard,” a network spokeswoman said in response to a Washington Post report on the allegations, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported. “We are suspending Paris, effective immediately, while we look into the allegations.”
Dennard got canned as events director for Arizona State University’s McCain Institute for International Leadership “for making sexually explicit comments and gestures toward women,” the Post reported, citing a university official and documents.
In one incident, Dennard reportedly told a recent graduate who worked for him that he wanted to have sex with her. The Post cited an ASU report indicating Dennard had “pretended to unzip his pants in her presence, tried to get her to sit on his lap, and made masturbatory gestures.”
Dennard did not deny the claims in the report at the time, according to the Post, but said he had been joking. But he told the Post that he believed the allegations were false and declined to discuss specifics.
He did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Dennard, who has also contributed to The Hill and NPR, was a vocal supporter of Trump during the presidential campaign and later insisted that Trump’s alleged sexual indiscretions should have no impact on his presidency.
In a CNN broadcast earlier this year, Dennard argued with a Republican strategist who asserted that Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels were relevant: “You can dig up dirty laundry and I pray to God that nobody goes back in your past,” Dennard said.
When white privilege is not in
full effect, some Caucasians have a breakdown. This was the case for a
59 year old doctor at a Florida airport on Thursday.
Jeffrey Epstein, a doctor from Lakeland, Florida, was “frothing at
the mouth while yelling obscenities” in a ticket line at the Orlando
International Airport, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
He was removed from the line and told he could not fly before throwing a
loud temper tantrum and refusing to leave the airport.
Police attempted to arrested him but he refused and was thrown to the
ground and pepper sprayed.
When he hit the ground, the doctor yelled,
“You’re treating me like a fucking Black person!”
Here’s a hint: If he was really treated like a “Black person,” he
would have been fatally shot the millisecond he resisted arrested, which
he most certainly did. Lucky for him, his white privilege saved his
day, and life.
Epstein was charged with battery, resisting arrest, trespassing and disorderly conduct before being released on bond.
“I’m a provocative guy, and I do it on purpose,” Epstein told My9NJ.com.
“You know why? Because people don’t say stuff. If you say it, people
will debate it and talk about it. Maybe we’ll get a solution.”
He continued: “I figured a white guy getting arrested at an airport
might get some attention to these Black people who I think are
legitimately concerned. If I was a Black person, I’d be terrified.”
Police said they found cannabis on him, but Epstein claimed he was
“not under the influence of any drugs when the incident happened.”
Again, if he was really being treated like a Black person, he would
be locked up for longer than he needs to be and forced to take a plea
deal that could ruin the rest of his life. He might also have a
“terrorist ” charge slapped on his record because the incident was at an
airport. But we doubt this will happen, as Dr. Epstein’s white
privilege has already kicked in, which means he will more than likely be
cleared of all charges.
Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017.
When
Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service,
told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t
interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the
previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of
Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and
citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire
agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern
Ukraine, to name just a few issues.
When
I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was
intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many
years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or
elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous
times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.
Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.
Before,
during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential
election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad
through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array
of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned
human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies
present an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians,
political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are
readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright
by Russian intelligence operatives.
The very freedoms and liberties that
liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been
exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect
sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and
disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media
platforms.
Having worked closely
with the F.B.I. over many years on counterintelligence investigations, I
was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously within the
United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield
actual or potential power. Like Mr. Bortnikov, these Russian operatives
and agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll
political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or
unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian
puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.
In
my many conversations with James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in the
summer of 2016, we talked about the potential for American citizens,
involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands. We
knew that Russian intelligence services would do all they could to
achieve their objectives, which the United States intelligence community
publicly assessed a few short months later were to undermine public
faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the
Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr.
Trump. We also publicly assessed that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services
were following his orders. Director Comey and I, along with the director
of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, pledged that our
agencies would share, as appropriate, whatever information was
collected, especially considering the proven ability of Russian
intelligence services to suborn United States citizens.
The
already challenging work of the American intelligence and law
enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016,
however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called
upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a
statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to
collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly
authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary
against his political opponent.
Such
a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump
privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did —
to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities
during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an
open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances
of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian
intelligence services.
Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.
The
only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place
constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice
occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members
of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by
laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets. A
jury is about to deliberate bank and tax fraud charges against one of those people, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman.
And the campaign’s former deputy chairman, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.
Mr.
Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those
close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to
revoke my security clearance
in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge
him. Now more than ever, it is critically important that the special
counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team of investigators be allowed to
complete their work without interference — from Mr. Trump or anyone else
— so that all Americans can get the answers they so rightly deserve.
John O. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Claims Are Hogwash. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
John Brennan says that he believes the resident's increasingly erratic
behavior is because special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation is
closing in on the resident and people close to him. Mieke Eoyang, Ron
Klain and Stuart Stevens join Lawrence.
Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.
It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in
the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now
Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood
conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib
Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and
took his chances in America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name.
Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and
sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off
debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That
group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the
western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town
that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family
quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a
haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of
supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam,
and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big
enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of
people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this
family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous,
educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most
important, American citizens.
What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen
Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s
mother, Miriam, is my sister.
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an
educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect
of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our
family’s life in this country.
I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers
had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the
radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their
parents, and even talk of limiting
citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made
his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few
years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of
the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees.
Had Wolf-Leib waited,
his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all
but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage
Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of
Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do
not envision a similar fate for him.
Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always
a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no
state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children,
and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were
excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns,
couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or
universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate
mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum,
rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser
family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream.
Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the
miracle of America.
Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and
Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to
the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the
only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration.
Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the
run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and
his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic
possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on
the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)
These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony
but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not
the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the
deaths and suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the
victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics
one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for
the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my
family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I
have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our
shared heritage.
In the early 2000's, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the
age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert
military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which
aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical
sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was
actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was
nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into
the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on
me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons
for the others to see.”
Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a
military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other
men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph
was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken
to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon
regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic
driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he
joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that
would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.
Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the
false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my
nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high
school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan
in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for
desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his
way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned
to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a
southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of
the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable,
exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had
a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.
Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child.
He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for
every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not
seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries
and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears
physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and
make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its
particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans
fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni
woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing
sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped
kidnap-bride from central Asia.
Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an
existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in
world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my
nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the
insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these
refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the
grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the
early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their
political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American
family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war,
poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these
immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of
America.
Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy
that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country
of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about
immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on
that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of
justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but
tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the
judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is
rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America.
Immigration reform
is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the
nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their
political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion
cannot be trusted to do so. As free Americans, and descendants of
immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our
conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest
national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.
