Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Racists became more racist during the Trump years -- according to science



According to 13 studies published this week by the journal Nature Human Behavior, the presidency of Donald Trump ushered in a wave of overt racism with the researchers also bluntly stating a person claiming to be a supporter of the former president is likely to express racist views.

As Courthouse News is reporting, "Racial and religious prejudice increased significantly among Donald Trump supporters during his presidency" based on the studies' interviews with more than 10,000 participants.

According to the report in the journal, "These results suggest that Trump's presidency coincided with a substantial change in the topography of prejudice in the United States."

"Regardless of what we controlled for, Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in prejudice," the report stated.

Asked for comment, Tim Hagle, of the University of Iowa, said attacks on Trump supporters by opponents of the former president likely contributed to their coming out of the closet and spouting racist rhetoric.

“The left didn’t want to just demonize Trump, they wanted to demonize the people who supported Trump," Tim Hagle, an associate professor of political science explained. "If you keep calling people racist, pretty soon they are going to say, 'This is what I believe. You can say anything about me that you want.'”

Author Stephen Farnsworth chimed in, "Trump was able to be a vehicle to express ones' frustration with political correctness and tolerance. He didn’t create it. These hostilities existed before him but he was a vehicle to channel that grievance."


Prejudice grew in Trump supporters during his presidency, studies find

"Regardless of what we controlled for, Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in prejudice," the paper says.



Racial and religious prejudice increased significantly among Donald Trump supporters during his presidency, according to a the results of 13 studies published Monday by the journal Nature Human Behavior.

The studies included more than 10,000 participants. The researchers, Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and Melissa J. Ferguson of Yale University, both social psychologists, also found that Trump opponents showed decreases in prejudice.

"These results suggest that Trump's presidency coincided with a substantial change in the topography of prejudice in the United States," the article says.

A scholar not involved in the study said the findings are what most social scientists would expect.

“Trump was able to be a vehicle to express ones' frustration with political correctness and tolerance," said Stephen Farnsworth, author of Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump. "He didn’t create it. These hostilities existed before him but he was a vehicle to channel that grievance."

Another scholar cautioned that prejudice had increased on both the left and the right of the political spectrum during the Trump years. And anger directed at Trump supporters could have affected their answers to the questions.

“The left didn’t want to just demonize Trump, they wanted to demonize the people who supported Trump," said Tim Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa, who like Farnsworth had not seen the studies. "If you keep calling people racist, pretty soon they are going to say, 'This is what I believe. You can say anything about me that you want.'”

The studies examined prejudice against Muslims, Black people and other groups.

"Regardless of what we controlled for, Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in prejudice," the paper says.

What attitudes like these portend is not clear, said Farnsworth, professor and director center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. In American history, hate has sometimes been rewarded at the ballot box, but those movements come and go.

He also noted that some high-profile Republican office holders — Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tim Scott, for example — are members of minority groups.

“It makes sense to think of American politics as something like a pendulum," he said. "One side prevails, the other side fights back. We don’t have permanent political party majorities. We don’t have permanent political party minorities. Republicans five years from now may find a libertarian message more appealing than appeals to racial identity.”

https://www.courthousenews.com/prejudice-grew-in-trump-supporters-during-his-presidency-studies-find/

[Rick Plant]

Clarence Thomas needs to be impeached from the Supreme Court. And along with his wife, they both need to held criminally liable for election fraud and interference.

Clarence Thomas' network tied to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: NYT



A network of people tied to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and his wife went into action following the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The newspaper reported that "a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases" were either involved in legal efforts to overturn the election results or had helped to plan Jan. 6 rallies.

The report focused on wife Ginni Thomas, reporting "it was after Trump’s November loss that she would prove her loyalty beyond doubt, when she and her group urged on efforts to overturn the election."

"New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory. Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded," the newspaper reported.

The deep-dive report focused on Ginni Thomas' political activism.

"In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Republican lawmakers," the newspaper reported. "By then, the network around the Thomases was lighting up. On Dec. 10, a former Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. Eastman, went on 'War Room,' a podcast and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman argued that the country was already at the point of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly agreed."

The report noted Ginni Thomas was not only tied to Eastman and Bannon, but also Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump's Jan. 2 call trying to overturn the election results in Georgia.

"Turning Point USA, on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served, was a sponsor of the Jan. 6 event and provided buses for attendees. Other sponsors included two more groups with which Ginni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Party Patriots, headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist. The other was Women for America First, which held the permit for the rally at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kremer," the newspaper reported. "The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook to champion the attempt of a defeated president to stay in power, as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6, crossed a line for several people in the Thomases’ circle who talked to The Times."

Read the full report:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html

[Rick Plant]

Well, it's all over for Donnie. Even his own handpicked right wing Supreme Court didn't save him.    

Supreme Court rejects Trump's bid to shield January 6 records, bringing end to legal battle
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-supreme-court-january-6-committee-documents/

Supreme court rejects Trump’s request to block access to January 6 records
House panel investigating the attack is already combing through Trump White House documents related to the insurrection

The supreme court has formally rejected Donald Trump’s request to block the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack from accessing White House records related to the events of 6 January 2021.

The court announced on Tuesday in its latest list of orders that it would not take up Trump’s appeal to a lower-court ruling allowing the select committee access to the documents.

The news comes a month after the supreme court rejected Trump’s emergency motion to block the release of the documents as his case regarding executive privilege claims made its way through the courts.

That January ruling cleared the way for the select committee to start receiving Trump White House documents. They have already started combing through the records.

Seven people died as a result of the attack on the US Capitol by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.

The attack did not prevent certification of electoral college results, though 147 Republicans in the House and Senate did lodge objections.

More than 100 police officers were injured. More than 700 people have been charged. Eleven people, members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, face charges of seditious conspiracy.

Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Republican senators stayed loyal.

Only two Republicans, Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, sit on the House select committee investigating January 6 and Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.

The committee is working quickly, given Republicans’ expected takeover of the House after midterm elections in November.

Public hearings are believed to be on the way and key aides to Trump have been served with subpoenas or asked to co-operate. Few have. Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and key figure on the pro-Trump far right, has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress – a criminal charge carrying jail time.

Others including the former chief of staff Mark Meadows have refused to co-operate. Members of the panel have said they expect Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a key figure in attempts to overturn the election, to testify.

The supreme court’s formal rejection of Trump’s attempt to keep White House records away from the committee was not a surprise.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter: “Trump’s baseless and brazen attempt to keep the January 6 select committee from obtaining his White House records has now been turned down by the supreme court of the United States. No surprise there, but with this court one never knows until one knows …”

The court is currently imbalanced 6-3 in favor of conservatives, after Trump appointed three justices in his single four-year term in office.

Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by George HW Bush, was the only justice who said he would have granted Trump’s attempt to stop the January 6 committee gaining access to his records.

Thomas and his wife were the subject of an extensive New York Times profile published on Tuesday. Ginni Thomas is a conservative activist with close connections to pro-Trump groups.

Dustin Stockton, a conservative organizer with ties to Bannon, told the paper that Ginni Thomas was tasked with coordinating rightwing groups around Trump’s rally near the White House before the Capitol attack, so “there wouldn’t be any division”.

“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on 6 January” Stockton told the paper. “That Ginni was involved made sense – she’s pretty neutral and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”

Questions about Clarence Thomas’s role on the court given his wife’s work have mounted since the New Yorker published a lengthy piece of its own last month. Neither the justice nor Ginni Thomas has commented.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/22/us-supreme-court-upholds-access-to-trump-white-house-records-insurrection-january-6

[Rick Plant]

Trump lawyers got so angry in NY hearing, judge called time-outs: NYT
A NY judge ruled Thursday that Trump and his children must sit for a deposition in AG Letitia James' investigation into Trump Org business
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-lawyers-ny-ag-hearing-judge-calls-time-outs-report-2022-2

[Rick Plant]

The GOP are anti American traitors. They root for Putin over America. Criminal Donald is Putin's puppet.

'He threatened nuclear extinction': Trump and Pompeo pummeled by Morning Joe for Putin praise

The co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" kicked off Wednesday morning by hammering former president Donald Trump and former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo over comments they made praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After sharing a clip of a smiling and effusive Pompeo heaping praise in the Russian strongman, a grim-faced Joe Scarborough expressed his disgust.

"We are so far from having a Republican Party or having conservatives that come out of the lineage of Ronald Reagan or Jeane Kirkpatrick, or conservatives out of the mode of Margaret Thatcher," he began before quoting Pompeo saying of Putin, "He has 'enormous respect and says he is elegantly sophisticated, a counterpart'."

"He's talking about a man now who has threatened nuclear extinction on NATO, on the United States, the world, if he is not allowed to invade yet again for the third time over the past 13, 14 years," the Morning Joe host elaborated. "He says, 'elegantly sophisticated' and said there's not much gain in him assassinating journalists, not much gain in him assassinating political opponents, that it lights up the human rights light and makes it hard for them to work together."

"It was as pro-Putin has you could be, but this is happening all over the place," he continued. "This is happening on Fox News; you have people on Fox News who are openly running down Ukraine, a country that's striving to move toward the west and move toward democracy. You see it happening with the Republicans in the House. You see it happening, of course, with Donald Trump."

"Donald Trump is actually saluting Vladimir Putin for invading a sovereign power, it doesn't stop," he added.

WATCH BELOW:

[Rick Plant]

The troubling role of Clarence Thomas' wife in Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election



For decades, Ginni Thomas, a top brass conservative activist, has devoted her life to advocating for right-wing causes, aligning herself with donor networks and advocacy groups that have and continue to play a key role in maintaining Republican authority. But Ginni Thomas is no ordinary Republican operative; she is also the wife of Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. And as her political activities extreme, critics fear that, given the recent rash of partisan Supreme Court rulings, she may have concerning sway over her husband's jurisprudence.

On Tuesday, The New York Times Magazine reported that the couple has "defied" the ethical "norms" of the Supreme Court, particularly when it comes to Ginni Thomas' political projects, whose goals almost always align with her husband's professed ideological leanings.

"She's an operator; she stays behind the scenes," ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Times. "Unlike a lot of people who just talk, she gets Helicopter done."

For one, Ginni Thomas reportedly serves in a prominent role in the Council for National Policy, a shadowy umbrella organization that brings together a number of leaders from groups like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council. According to the Times, Thomas specifically serves on the C.N.P. Action, the 501(c)(4) arm of the organization, which "allows for direct political advocacy."

Following Donald Trump's election loss in November 2020, C.N.P. Action reportedly circulated "action steps" aimed at pressuring state officials in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania to go along with the former president's campaign to reinstall himself as president.

"There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state," the group reportedly wrote in a December memo.

In the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot, fomented by the very election fraud claims C.N.P. Action espoused, the group reportedly sought to "drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests" and "amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy," according to documents obtained by the Times.

By February, a coalition of Pennsylvania Republicans brought Trump's election fraud claims to the Supreme Court, arguing that the ballots had been systematically compromised. While their allegations were ultimately shut down by the court, Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, writing that his own colleagues' reasoning was "inexplicable."

Ginni Thomas has also advocated on several other issues that recently made their way to the Supreme Court. In particular, the Council for National Policy campaigned aggressively against abortion and lockdowns during COVID-19. Incidentally, in January, the Supreme Court in insulated a near-total ban on abortions. And the next month, it prohibited a ban on indoor church services despite the spread of the coronavirus.

Though much of her work is reserved to the world of advocacy, Ginni Thomas also reportedly meddled in the Trump administration's staffing, a habit that at times irked White House aides.

"In the White House, she was out of bounds many times," one of Trump's senior aides told the Times. "It was always: 'We need more MAGA people in government. We're trying to get these résumés through, and we're being blocked.' I appreciated her energy, but a lot of these people couldn't pass background checks."

Another aide, more tersely, called her a "wrecking ball."

According to the Times, Trump told Ginni Thomas that she was welcome to drop in for visits to the White House. Numerous aides said that "she was also reportedly known to pass "notes" to the president "on her priorities through intermediaries."

In one alleged meeting with the president, held back in 2019, Ginni Thomas brought in members of Groundswell, a conservative group that, according to Mother Jones, is planning "a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation."

"It was the craziest meeting I've ever been to," a Trump aide told the Times. "She started by leading the prayer." The aide also recalled talk of "the transsexual agenda" and of parents "chopping off their children's breasts."

The following year, the Times noted, Justice Thomas joined his conservative colleagues in a dissent arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

https://www.rawstory.com/the-troubling-role-of-clarence-thomas-wife-in-trump-s-efforts-to-overturn-the-2020-election/

[Rick Plant]

Trump should face these two federal charges based solely on public information: former prosecutor



Donald Trump should be charged with two federal crimes based solely on publicly available information, according to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade.

McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday night to discuss her 26-page "model prosecution memo" for Trump published by Just Security.

McQuade said that based on public reporting and Jan. 6 documents, "I think there's a strong case both as to what Donald Trump did, and what his intent was."

"If you look at this, it seems to me that there's very strong evidence that Donald Trump sought to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election, and that he knew, because of all the information he had, that it was based on a false premise that the election was stolen," McQuade said.

"So what the prosecution memo does is it amasses all that evidence, it puts it in one document, and then it analyzes it," McQuade added. "What are the elements of the offenses, and does the set of facts satisfy the elements of those offenses? And I submit that these two charges that I've laid out here — conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of an official proceeding — are met by the evidence of Donald Trump pressuring Mike Pence to overturn the election as he did in private meetings, as he did in pubic remarks, as he did on Twitter."

"And, importantly — and I'm not sure it's been gathered in one place — all of the information that Donald Trump had that should have led him to believe that he knew that the election was not stolen," she said. "You know, he has said repeatedly it was stolen, but at some point, when enough people tell you it wasn't, at what point is it a reasonable inference to believe that he never believed it at all? He made it up out of full cloth. A person can say all day, 'The sky is green, the sky is green, the sky is green.' But after dozens of people tell you the sky is blue, and there's not a wit of evidence that the sky is green, I don't think a reasonable juror in America would think that he believe the sky is green."

Watch below.