‘Republicans against Trump’ protester: Trump is a fascist who is turning his supporters into animals

 

The Guardian reports: The man whose protest saw Donald Trump rushed off the stage by Secret Service agents has said the Republican nominee’s supporters turned on him when he held up a sign reading: “Republicans against Trump”.

The man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites from Reno, told the Guardian he was holding the sign at a rally when Trump supporters wrestled him to the ground.

The 33-year-old – who says he has been a registered Republican for about six years – said he was kicked, punched and choked, and feared for his life when the crowd turned on him at the gathering in Reno, Nevada.

Crites cited Trump’s treatment of Mexicans, Muslims and women as the reason he decided to protest again Trump, who he described as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”. [Continue reading…]

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In America’s democratic showcase, the world sees a model of what not to do

The Washington Post reports: In the seaside cafes of Beirut, the whole thing looks “like a bad joke.” To persecuted journalists in Burundi, it amounts to “a total loss of dignity.” The government-scripted press of Beijing diagnoses “an empire moving downhill.” And the spin doctors of the Kremlin see cause for pure and unambiguous delight.

The U.S. presidential election — America’s quadrennial chance to showcase for the world how democracy works in the most powerful nation on Earth — has become instead an object lesson in everything that ails a country long seen as a beacon of freedom and hope.

Debates devoid of issues and deep in the gutter of personal insult. Interference from foreign intelligence services. Endless leaked emails, and FBI investigations that could extend long beyond Tuesday.

Americans may cringe watching their own election at close range. But the world’s reaction has been, in a sense, even more poignant and foreboding. [Continue reading…]

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A scholar of fascism sees a lot that’s similar with Trump

Jonathan Blitzer writes: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an American-born professor of Italian history at New York University, specializes in male menace. What interests her is the manufactured drama of world-historical strongmen — their mannerisms, speech patterns, stagecraft, and mythomania. Late last year, Ben-Ghiat had just published a book called “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema,” about the years of Benito Mussolini, when another spectacle wrested her attention. One of the candidates for the American Presidency was looking a lot like her principal academic subject. As President Obama put it, the United States now had its own “homegrown authoritarian.”

Earlier this week, Ben-Ghiat sat at a table in her office, at N.Y.U.’s Casa Italiana, on Twelfth Street, inspecting two signatures on the screen of her laptop. One of them belonged to Donald Trump, the other to Mussolini. The scrawls — loopy, cursive, steepled — looked so similar that they seemed to blur together. Ben-Ghiat, who wore a gray sweater and dark skirt, is gracefully soft-spoken, her manner reserved. “I’m interested in how their language and writing are a kind of emanation of their bodies,” she said.

When Mussolini was a Socialist, he wrote his name as “Benito Mussolini.” “Then he dropped the Benito,” Ben Ghiat said. “He even had his stage name, which was Il Duce.” Trump also likes talking about himself in the third person. “He’s selling his product, which is himself,” she said. It’s a cult of personality peddled as good business. During the primaries, he recited a loyalty pledge in which he led his supporters in a promise to vote for him. (“I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote . . . for Donald J. Trump for President.”) While administering the oath, he raised his arm before the crowds in a quasi-Fascist salute. (“I mean, we’re having such a good time,” Trump said later. “Sometimes we do it for fun, and they start screaming at me, ‘Do the swearing! Do the swearing!’ ”) [Continue reading…]

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A muted alarm bell over Russian election hacking

Liz Spayd, Public Editor for the New York Times, writes: Last winter, as primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire headed to the polls, a covert and cunning Russian plot was underway to disrupt the American political process. With aliases like Guccifer 2.0 and Fancy Bear, Russian hackers were targeting critical computer systems.

In June, they struck, hitting the Democratic Party, and by July its chairman was ousted in the fallout. Soon embarrassing emails were spilling from the computers of Hillary Clinton and her staff. Republican officials were hit, too. So was the National Security Agency. Now, hackers are meddling with the voting systems in several states, leaving local officials on high alert. Come Election Day, they’ll find out what, if anything, the cyberspies have in store.

This is an act of foreign interference in an American election on a scale we’ve never seen, yet on most days it has been the also-ran of media coverage, including at The New York Times.

The emails themselves — exposing the underside of the Democratic political machinery, and the conflicts, misjudgments and embarrassing communications of its top ranks — have received bountiful attention. What rarely makes the main narrative is the spy-versus-spy cyberwarfare: the tactics, the players and the government efforts to tame it. In a calamitous campaign unlike any in memory, it’s not surprising that other story lines get squeezed out. But one of the most chilling chapters of this election is the role of Russian intelligence and the growing threat of digital espionage. With days to go, readers have been shortchanged on this part of history. [Continue reading…]

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Black church burned down by arsonist who wrote, ‘Vote Trump,’ as Trump remains silent

The Daily Beast reports: The latest instance of the insanity this election has wrought took place on a dead-end street in a black neighborhood, where someone burned a 111-year-old baptist church and wrote “Vote Trump” on the side.

Hillary Clinton immediately took to Twitter to condemn the act, saying, “This kind of hate has no place in America.” It was signed “H” to show it was from Clinton herself. But when it came to the burning of a black church in his own name, Trump’s little fingers didn’t touch his favorite means of reaching millions of supporters, Twitter. Instead, his campaign issued a boilerplate statement.

So these are stakes of this election: a potential president who would not even condemn in his own words terrorism done in his own name. [Continue reading…]

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Trump campaign and Republicans paid $1.8m to companies mired in voter fraud claims

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) have paid at least $1.8m to a political operative whose roster of companies include several that have been repeatedly investigated for voter registration fraud, even as Trump has complained that the election is rigged against him.

Three employees of Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm owned by conservative operative Nathan Sproul, pleaded guilty in Florida four years ago to felony charges related to altering and destroying scores of voter registration forms. There were no formal actions against the firm.

Yet recent federal campaign finance reports reviewed by Associated Press show Sproul is now back on the RNC’s payroll, this time with a firm named Lincoln Strategy Group, a renamed version of his former firm Sproul & Associates, an Arizona-based firm that was investigated for alleged voter registration misconduct in Nevada and Oregon. [Continue reading…]

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Specter of election day violence looms as Trump spurs vigilante poll watchers

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s claims of “large-scale” voter fraud have prompted officials across the political spectrum to warn about the dangers of vigilante poll monitors amid fears of confrontations or even violence on US election day.

As opinion polls tightened this week between Trump and Hillary Clinton ahead of Tuesday’s presidential vote, there are concerns of chaos following his claims, without serious evidence, that the election could be “rigged” and his refusal to say if he will accept the outcome.

The Democratic party has launched a series of legal challenges around the country alleging voter intimidation, and on Friday in the battleground state of Ohio a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s campaign and his unofficial adviser Roger Stone. The ruling said anyone who engaged in intimidation or harassment inside or near Ohio polling places would face contempt of court charges.

Republican leaders in some battleground states are reporting a surge of volunteers signing up to serve as official poll watchers, and in an unprecedented move, the Trump campaign itself has since August been requesting that volunteers sign up as “election observers” to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”. Stone, meanwhile, has said he has helped recruit people to do “exit polls” to tackle voter fraud. [Continue reading…]

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Stratosphere shrinks as record breaking temperatures continue because of climate change

Peter Hannam reports: Those warning of climate change impacts have been likened to Chicken Littles, scuttling around, warning the sky is falling.

That worry, it turns out, is based on fact too. Cooling in the stratosphere is causing it to shrink, lowering that layer by “a number of kilometres”, NASA noted recently.

Our burning of fossil fuels and emissions of other greenhouse gases mean more of the earth’s heat that would have been radiated back to space – warming the stratosphere on the way – is being trapped at lower levels of the atmosphere.

“It’s like when you insulate your roof – your house warms but your attic will get a bit cooler,” says Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of NSW. Those “attic” temperatures have cooled 2-3 degrees since the 1960s.

To be sure, the shrinking stratosphere is only partly climate-change related, with the emergence of ozone holes the other main factor. Still, “it’s all about the human impact on the climate system”, Professor Sherwood says. [Continue reading…]

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Trump has spent decades trying and failing to get a foothold in the Russian market

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s infatuation with Russia goes back more than 30 years, to the glasnost period of the Soviet Union when communism proved no impediment to get-rich-quick artists with loose scruples and gaudy tastes. In 1988 Trump was famously hoodwinked by Ronald Knapp, a Gorbachev impersonator, who stopped by Trump Tower and shook The Donald’s hand in what the latter clearly imagined was a rare moment in history, not to mention a wide enough slit in the Iron Curtain for capitalists on the make to wriggle through.

In 1986, Yuri Dubinin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, invited Trump to Moscow to discuss building a hotel that could stand as a symbol of the mogul’s international reach. Trump sought to erect his signature “Trump Tower” as an unmistakable totem to himself in the once-impenetrable capital of the world’s only other superpower.

And yet, not then, and no since, have we seen a gilded monstrosity rising in above the onion domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Russia, it seems, has proven too elusive for Trump to establish his highly touted name-brand, even though he and his scions have boasted of the steady stream of rubles pouring their way. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin became the Che Guevara of the Right

Peter Pomerantsev writes: “He’s a Kremlin puppet!” has been a clarion call for those rallying to stop U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

But his public pro-Putin positions, and a few unfounded Kremlin links thrown in by his detractors, haven’t hurt Trump in the polls. And he’s not alone. Similar charges have been thrown at the successful campaign to leave the European Union and at right-wing movements gaining traction in Europe.

So is accusing your opponent of being Putin’s pal a good strategy? What if accusing someone of colluding with the Kremlin actually helps their cause?

Imagine, for a moment, you are the leader of an “anti-establishment” political movement. You thrill your followers by sticking it to the “liberal elites” and the “global order.” There’s nothing more “anti-establishment” than showing two fingers to such elite, aloof projects as NATO or the EU, and giving props to the man who wants to undermine them — Vladimir Putin.

What better way to milk the outrage of the “liberal” media than by siding with a Kremlin that has made attacking “liberal values” its motto? And wouldn’t you welcome attacks from liberal elites for associating you with the sort of disruption you wish to emulate?

For the “anti-establishment” Right, giving Putin the thumbs-up has become the equivalent of what pulling on a Che T-shirt has long meant for the Left. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-backed Syrian rebels declare attack on ISIS in Raqqa

Reuters reports: U.S.-backed rebels said on Sunday they were launching an operation to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State.

The attack ratchets up pressure on the militant group at a critical moment, with its fighters already battling an offensive by Iraqi security forces on their remaining Iraqi stronghold in the northern city of Mosul.

The U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab armed groups, first announced on Sunday that a campaign to retake Raqqa would begin within hours, with U.S. forces providing air cover. Soon afterwards, it said that the operation, called Euphrates Anger, had begun. [Continue reading…]

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Civilian casualties are starting to rise as Iraqi forces push into Mosul

The Washington Post reports: The vehicles screeched into the small field hospital on the outskirts of Mosul carrying desperate loads: soldiers injured in battle as well as men, women and children caught in the crossfire of Iraq’s war against the Islamic State.

Some staggered out clutching bleeding wounds; others were lifted by medics onto stretchers. They had come face-to-face with chlorine gas, mortar fire, bombs and artillery shells.

For a few, it was too late, and instead of a stretcher, a body bag waited.

The medical station, manned by medics from Iraq’s special forces alongside U.S. and Serbian volunteers, provides a small window onto the inevitable human toll of the battle to oust the Islamic State from Mosul as the war pushes deeper into the city. [Continue reading…]

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On the front lines inside Mosul

 

CNN reports: For more than 28 hours, CNN senior international correspondent Arwa Damon and photojournalist Brice Laine were with Iraqi special forces during their push into ISIS-held Mosul. It was a new phase of the liberation operation — switching from villages and open terrain to a dense city that a well-equipped ISIS is determined to defend.

Their convoy was leading the attack Friday when it came under attack multiple times.

Vehicles were destroyed, soldiers were hurt. Troops and journalists sought shelter in a succession of houses, calling for backup again and again.

Inside the armored vehicles, hiding with families in houses, Arwa Damon kept notes amid the heat of the battle. Here is her account, with occasional strong language. It has been lightly edited for clarity. [Continue reading…]

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Trump is a threat to the West as we know it, even if he loses

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Anne Applebaum writes: They share ideas and ideology, friends and funders. They cross borders to appear at one another’s rallies. They have deep contacts in Russia — they often use Russian disinformation — as well as friends in other authoritarian states. They despise the West and seek to undermine Western institutions. They think of themselves as a revolutionary avant-garde just like, once upon a time, the Communist International, or Comintern, the Soviet-backed organization that linked communist parties around Europe and the world. Now, of course, they are not Soviet-backed, and they are not communist. But this loose group of parties and politicians — Austria’s Freedom Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the UK Independence Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, Poland’s Law and Justice, Donald Trump — have made themselves into a global movement of “anti-globalists.” Meet the “Populist International”: Whoever wins the U.S. election Tuesday, its influence is here to stay.

Although it is often described (by me and others searching for a shorthand) as “far-right,” the Populist International has little to do with the “right” that has thrived in Western countries since World War II. Continental European Christian Democracy arose out of a postwar desire to bring morality back to politics; Gaullism came out of a long French tradition of statism and secularism; Anglo-Saxon conservatives had a historic preference for free markets. Most of them shared a Burkean small-“c” conservatism: a dislike of radical change, skepticism of “progress,” a belief in the importance of conserving institutions and values. Most of them emerged out of particular local and historical traditions. All of them shared a devotion to representative democracy, religious tolerance, Western integration and the Western alliance.

By contrast, the parties that belong to the Populist International, and the media that support it, are not Burkean. They don’t want to conserve or preserve what exists. Instead, they want to radically overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past — or that they believe existed in the past — by force. Their language takes different forms in different countries, but their revolutionary projects often include the expulsion of immigrants, or at least the return to all-white (or all-Dutch, or all-German) societies; the resurrection of protectionism; the reversal of women’s or minorities’ rights; the end of international institutions and cooperation of all kinds. They advocate violence: In 2014, Trump said that “you’ll have to have riots to go back to where we used to be, when America was great.” [Continue reading…]

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If Donald Trump wins, it’ll be a new age of darkness

Jonathan Freedland writes: We are standing on the brink of the abyss. And, like anyone who’s ever peered into a chasm, we are experiencing a queasy, sinking feeling. All round the world, not just in the United States, people are contemplating the prospect that on Wednesday morning we will wake to hear of victory for Donald J Trump.

The mere imagining of that outcome is inducing anxiety in those far away from the action. I don’t just mean obsessives such as me, who spend the midnight hour checking the early voting returns from Washoe County, Nevada. Otherwise normal people also confess to being reduced to nervous wrecks by the thought that Trump might actually win. They chart their mood swings on social media, delighting in hopeful news – Hillary Clinton up in ABC News tracking poll! – or panicking at any sign the snake-oil salesman might pull it off, such as today’s Washington Post headline: “Donald Trump has never been closer to the presidency than he is at this moment”, I could feel my palms turn clammy.

In Britain we feel especially vulnerable. If you voted remain, the memory of a ballot going the wrong way is fresh. And not just any ballot, but one you believe will cause lasting, epochal damage. The thought that Tuesday might bring the second such moment in a year is one to dread. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s unrequited love for Vladimir Putin

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s oft-stated admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t just about macho admiration or authoritarian envy. It’s more in the spirit of a locker-room rivalry, a matter of camaraderie and competition — and to some extent deterrence. Searching for an analogy, one thinks of the way Russia-friendly U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrbacher once reportedly arm wrestled with Putin to decide who really won the Cold War. (One should note that Rohrbacher lost.)

Trump’s frenemy strategy — or ambivalence, it’s hard to know which — may account for why he went from asking aloud on Twitter in 2013 before the Miss Universe Pageant, will Putin “become my new best friend?” to saying during the candidates’ debate on Oct. 19, “I don’t know Putin. I have never met Putin. He is not my best friend”—prompting a lot of weepy Putin memes on social media.

While Trump’s business dealings with Russia and his foreign policy advisors’ ties to Russia have been intensely scrutinized by the media and now the FBI, evidence of direct Russian manipulation of Trump with the intent of affecting the U.S. election has been elusive.

The Russian leadership’s own statements and the Russian domestic media and English-language propaganda outlets have been easier to document. But even those organs are careful to keep at least a semblance of balanced reporting on the U.S. presidential campaign, while Putin and top officials have repeatedly stressed their neutrality. [Continue reading…]

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Voter intimidation: What to do if someone tries to stop you from voting

U.S. News reports: Voter intimidation may seem to many a relic of America’s distant past, but even in the world’s foremost democracy, complaints persist about harassment and intimidation during the ballot-casting process.

U.S. News spoke with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Campaign Legal Center about what is and what isn’t allowed at polling sites, what constitutes intimidation or suppression, and what to do if you see it or it happens to you.

Note that state rules vary. To check the voting laws and regulations in your state, visit www.866ourvote.org/state, which is maintained by the Lawyers’ Committee. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A U.S. judge in Ohio ordered Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign on Friday not to intimidate voters as voting-rights advocates scored a string of last-minute victories in several politically competitive states.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Gwin creates the possibility of fines or jail time for Trump allies who harass voters, a significant victory for Democrats who had worried the real-estate mogul was encouraging supporters to cause mayhem at the polls on Nov. 8.

The ruling also deals a blow to a Trump-aligned “exit poll” that seeks to mobilize thousands of supporters. [Continue reading…]

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