Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

 

Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also — wait for it — a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout.

Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine. Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism.

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump.

Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined.

It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, Whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in-between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, D.C., had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the White race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of White Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-White immigrants from the global South. Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.

Epstein on Race

Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences.

Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).

According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.

Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help.

In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”

Epstein also spent time on hardcore White supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright White supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science.

According to the Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.

The “Great Gene” President

Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House. For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:

“Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”

“You have to have the rights — the right genes.”

“Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”

“I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”

And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former  White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.

It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and Congressional Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Jasmine Crockett, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, radio host Charlamagne the God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.

Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling White-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).

His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025, speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for White — and implicitly White only — immigration to this country:

“Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people?”

In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.

At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 White South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely, claiming that Whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27th and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS), and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.

Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid 19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology.

It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.

In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft — legal at the time — would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations.

After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.

Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in U.S. history. He will never acknowledge — or even understand — that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.

Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a professor and former Chairman of Howard University’s Department of Political Science. He is author of many books. His latest is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.

 -Clarence Lusane, CounterPunch

“Send Them Back” Is the Oldest Racial Taunt in History, and Now It’s Being Amplified by Trump

 

Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the SOTU and from his office yesterday morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking. This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base naming and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Obama, Biden, Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props. They’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty. Trump’s attack on Robert De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.” “Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other, so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it. The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.

That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.

-Thom Hartmann

Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s passing

 

With Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s passing, we lose one of the dwindling numbers of direct links to Martin Luther King, Jr. and to the mid-20^th century Civil Rights generation. From the Lorraine Motel to stewardship of Rainbow/PUSH to his own presidential campaigns to his successful hostage negotiations to Barack Obama’s election to the Black Lives Matter movement, he was front and center in racial justice fights, a symbol of both the tremendous progress and the enduring, at times exhausting, presence of White supremacists who seek to erase history and undo decades of hard-won gains.

While the country lacks a singular figure to lead the racial justice movement, the number of organizations and plethora of elected figures (including the likely next House Speaker) are part of Jackson’s legacy, a permanent army of civil rights activists who stand in opposition to the Make America White Again ideology at the heart of Trumpism. The challenge that was at the heart of Jackson’s work — the creation of a true multi-racial democracy — has never been more acute in the modern era.

It is always worth recalling Jackson’s iconic lines from his speech to the 1984 Democratic Convention: 

"Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight. America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt. Even in our fractured state, all of us count and all of us fit somewhere. We have proven that we can survive without each other. But we have not proven that we can win and progress without each other. We must come together."

The Trump regime presents the greatest attack on that vision of pluralistic democracy and racial justice in the modern era. Should the MAGA partisan hacks on the Supreme Court succeed in eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, the political map will resemble the political landscape in the Jim Crow era in which Black and Hispanic voting power was minimal to nonexistent, representatives at all levels of government were overwhelmingly White, and one-party rule prevailed in the South.

Jackson would certainly recognize The SAVE Act, which would impose onerous proof of citizenship requirements to vote, as the latest MAGA disenfranchisement project, part of the never-ending assault to deprive communities of color access to the polls. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and 130 organizations have decried the assault on voting rights as being driven by “unprecedented disinformation campaigns and intrusions on the ability of states to make sound decisions on how to run their elections.” The effort to now require a birth certificate or passport to establish qualification to vote would be the culmination of a voter suppression drive begun over decade ago:

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), 31 states have enacted 114 restrictive voting laws, which disproportionately burden voters of color. The harm has been palpable: Racial disparities in voter turnout have been increasing, particularly in areas formerly protected by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision, which the Court dismantled.

The object of the new burdens on voting is obvious. “Approximately half of American adults do not have a passport, and two-thirds of Black Americans do not.…Nationwide, 69 million married women do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.” Transferring sensitive voter information to a federal database would only “increase the likelihood that citizens will see their registrations wrongly purged or their personal information compromised.”

All of this smacks of the literacy and poll tests imposed in the Jim Crow South, a set of mechanisms designed to make the electorate unrepresentative of the general population in order to maintain white dominance.

As the Legal Defense Fund explained after House passage of the worst voter suppression bill in over one hundred years, “The SAVE America Act would functionally dismantle online and mail-in voter registration, target election officials with egregious levels of civil and criminal liability, and disenfranchise millions of Americans by forcibly requiring documentary proof of citizenship and photo identification when registering to vote and when voting at the polls.” LDF continued: “Only 6% of voters currently register in person at an election office and over 146 million Americans do not currently own a passport.”

Rev. Jackson’s death occurring at the time as the SAVE Act looms over our democracy reminds us of the urgency of unity in fighting to reclaim the promise of America. His life’s work should inspire us not only to defeat the SAVE Act, confront ICE’s massive assault on civil rights, and overturn the assault on the social safety net, but to aspire to a better vision of America. Rev. Jackson reminds us:

"Our time has come. No grave can hold your body down. Our time has come. No lie can live forever. Our time has come. We must leave the racial battle ground and come to the economic common ground and moral higher ground. America, our time has come. We come from disgrace to amazing grace. Our time has come. Give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free and come November, there will be a change because our time has come." 

He was right in 1984, and his words ring just as true today. Our time has come.

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 Photo: United States Mission Geneva, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

"Trump’s Racist Attack on the Obamas Shows the Moral Collapse of His Presidency. This wasn’t a joke or a mistake but a warning about how racism, silence, and abuse of power are eating away at democracy…"

Normally I wouldn’t post such a disgusting, racist image that originated on Elon’s social media sewer, but it’s important for the historical record for Americans to see what the President of the United States reposted last night on his own site — as your and my representative — for the entire world to see. (Screengrab / Truth Social, per Raw Story)

I’ve been talking into microphones since I did the morning news on WITL in Lansing Michigan in the late 1960s, and I’ve seen a lot of ugly moments in American politics. But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it’s surprising, but because it’s so painfully revealing.

This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens — is one of those moments.

That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.

Promoting a video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as non-human primates isn’t a joke. It isn’t satire or an accident. It’s the oldest racist smear in the book, dressed up in a cheap meme and now blasted out by a man who once swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the president of the United States does something like this, it doesn’t just insult two people. It tells a story about who, according to the most powerful man in the world, belongs in America and who doesn’t.

For centuries, racism in this country has relied on the lie that some people are less than human. That lie has been used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and mass incarceration.

It’s the lie that made it easier for people to look away while their neighbors were brutalized. It’s the lie that justifies ICE’s brutal, racist behavior. When Trump shares imagery that taps directly into that history, he’s not being edgy: he’s reopening wounds that never fully healed.

When the President of the United States signals that this kind of racism is acceptable, it gives permission to others. It tells the kid being harassed at school, the family being targeted by a hate group, and the voter being pushed out of the polling line that the cruelty they’re experiencing is justified. That it’s their own fault.

It tells the bullies and thugs of ICE as they do their “Kavanaugh Stops” — targeting people based on their race — that they’re on the right side of power. This isn’t just about harm to minorities, although that harm is real and immediate.

It’s about what happens to democracy itself when the presidency becomes a megaphone for dehumanization. Democracy depends on the idea that we’re all political equals. Once you start suggesting that some Americans are animals, that idea collapses. It becomes easier to justify taking away voting rights, ignore court rulings, or shrug when violence follows hateful rhetoric.

I remember a time, during the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when the presidency stood as a kind of moral North Star. Even when presidents like Nixon and Clinton failed to live up to it, there was at least a shared understanding that the office itself mattered. That it should pull us together, not rip us apart.

Trump has spent years doing the opposite, from the 1970s when he was busted along with his father for refusing to rent to Black people to his recent use of words like “vermin” and “shitholes” to describe Hispanic and Black people and majority-Black countries. Last night’s post is another brutally clear example of Trump’s deep, lifelong racism.

What’s even more chilling is the silence from Republican leaders and elected officials. If you can’t bring yourself to condemn something this overtly racist, where exactly is your line? Silence in moments like this isn’t neutrality: it’s complicity. It tells people of color in America, already dealing with the burden of centuries of institutional racism, that their pain is irrelevant and their dignity a plaything in the hands of white people.

I know some people will say we should ignore it, that reacting “just feeds the outrage machine.” Trump’s propaganda princess, Karoline Leavitt, tried to downplay it by telling reporters this morning: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But pretending this doesn’t matter is how we normalize it and weaken our shared sense of humanity. And the end point of that is always disaster.

As California Governor Gavin Newsome just posted: “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.” “Denounce” is a bare minimum. This country can do better. We’ve done better before, often after terrible struggle and sacrifice.

But we won’t get there by minimizing moments like this or waving them off as “just another Trump post.” We get there by calling it what it is, by standing up for one another as equals in our humanity, and by insisting that the presidency must reflect our highest ideals, not our ugliest instincts.

If this doesn’t provoke the 13 white billionaires in Trump’s cabinet — who would all instantly fire anybody in any of their companies who posted such an image on their company’s servers — to start 25th Amendment proceedings or endorse impeachment, it’ll tell us everything about who they are, too. America is stronger when we recognize each other as fully human. The moment we let that slip; we all lose something precious.

-Thom Hartmann

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In 1948, live television was ruled by fear — fear of sponsors, censors, and angry letters. But one man refused to bend. His name was Ed Sullivan

 

   

When Nat King Cole was booked for The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS executives panicked. Sponsors threatened to pull their ads. “A Negro singer in prime time?” they said. “America’s not ready.” Ed’s reply was short and cold: “Then they can go to hell.”

That Sunday night, he walked onto the stage, looked straight into the camera, and said with quiet pride, “Ladies and gentlemen… Mr. Nat King Cole.” No hesitation. No apology.   

The mail that followed was hateful — pages of slurs, rage, and threats. Ed read every one of them… then did the only thing that made sense to him. He booked Nat again.

That was Ed Sullivan. He wasn’t charming. He wasn’t funny. He could barely introduce a band without tripping over the name. But he had something rarer — courage. He knew who mattered long before the world did.

When people called Elvis Presley obscene, Ed shrugged and said, “The boy’s got talent.” He booked him anyway — and then defended him live on air. When the network ordered him to film Elvis only from the waist up, Ed glared at the control booth and muttered, “This is ridiculous.”

He gave Harry Belafonte, The Supremes, and The Jackson 5 the spotlight when much of America still refused to watch Black artists.

Offstage, Ed could be gruff, awkward, even cold. But every performer knew one truth — if Ed Sullivan liked you, your life could change overnight.

And change it he did — for the world, too. It was Ed who brought The Beatles to America in 1964 after seeing their airport frenzy in London. Seventy-three million people tuned in that night. The nation didn’t realize it yet, but the old world ended, and a new one began — right there, on his stage.

He didn’t smile much. He didn’t dance. But he had nerve made of steel. Ed Sullivan wasn’t just a host — he was a quiet revolutionary who used the brightest lights in America to make the world a little fairer, a little braver, and a lot more alive.

“You don’t bow to fear,” he once said. “You put on the show.”

#fblifestyle

Trump's Deportations

 

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry. Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify.

But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

---

The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline…

-ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=toc

Bending The Arc of the Moral Universe Toward Justice

 

Today, racism remains a poisonous force in America. Fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise and President Donald Trump is giving voice to such hate, making it state policy and central to his presidential agenda. Recently, he tried to ban birthright citizenship by executive order to limit the number of babies of color born in the United States, though such an act is clearly unconstitutional.

Currently, at least two federal judges have blocked Trump’s executive orders to redefine birthright citizenship. He has also issued executive orders seeking to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion. He clearly does not want Black, Brown, and Asian people to be on an equal footing with Whites.

All his most recent efforts are consistent with his longstanding attempts to limit voting rights for people of color. Trump has voiced the most vicious comments over the years: he says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; he slammed Haitian migrants for trying to enter the United States by claiming hundreds of thousands of them flowing into the country “probably have AIDS”; Haiti, El Salvador, and African lands are “shithole countries”; migrants are “animals“; and, as he also put it, there has to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Finally, Trump has repeatedly stated his admiration for dictators and strong abusive rulers.

Trump’s Protection of Afrikaners

Trump, his enablers in the Republican Party, and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters should really be called Make America White Again (MAWA). He and those groups have generated a blueprint for increasing authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. It’s crystal clear that this enmity toward Black and Brown people is driven in part by demographic changes in the United States that threaten to place Whites in the minority.

On the subject of race, Trump is sensitive only when it comes to discrimination against White people. Recently, he signed an executive order that would protect White South Africans from discrimination and allow them to resettle in the United States…

Douglas H. White, CounterPunch

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/26/bending-the-arc-of-the-moral-universe-toward-justice/

 

Hegseth's Far-Right Beliefs

 

In a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson.

In the recordings, Hegseth rails against “cultural Marxism”, feminism, “critical race theory”, and even democracy itself, which he says, “our founders blatantly rejected as being completely dangerous”.

For much of the over five hours of recordings, which were published over February and March 2024, Hegseth also castigates public schools, which he characterizes as implementing an “egalitarian, dystopian LGBT nightmare”, and which the podcast host Joshua Haymes describes as “one of Satan’s greatest tools for excising Christ from not just our classrooms but our country”.

Elsewhere in the recordings, Hegseth expresses agreement with the principle of sphere sovereignty, which, in CR doctrine, envisions a subordination of “civil government” to Old Testament law, capital punishment for infringements of that law such as homosexuality, and rigidly patriarchal families and churches.

Julie Ingersoll, a professor and director of religious studies at the University of North Florida who has written extensively about Christian reconstructionism and Christian nationalism, told the Guardian: “When these guys say they believe in the separation of church and state, they’re being duplicitous. They do believe in separate spheres for church and state, but also in a theocratic authority that sits above both.”

Hegseth’s far-right beliefs have garnered attention as his nomination to lead the world’s largest military has proceeded. The former elite US soldier and Fox News television star has also garnered negative attention over media reports on his allegedly excessive drinking and allegations of sexual assault.

On Hegseth’s probable assumption of a high-ranking cabinet position in the Trump administration, and how he might view his constitutional role, Ingersoll said: “These folks are not particularly committed to democracy. They’re committed to theocracy.”

She added: “If the democratic system brings that about, so be it. If a monarchy brings it about, that’s OK, too. And if a dictatorship does, that’s also OK. So their commitment is to theocracy: the government of civil society according to biblical law and biblical revelation.”

Logan Davis, a researcher, consultant and columnist from Colorado, grew up in a reformed Calvinist church similar to Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which Hegseth now attends, and spent middle and high school in a classical Christian school affiliated to the one Hegseth’s children now attend. In November he wrote a column entitled “Pete Hegseth and I know the same Christian Nationalists”.

Asked how Hegseth would understand his oath if sworn in as secretary of defense, Davis said: “Hegseth will be swearing to defend the constitution that he, to the extent he is aligned with Doug Wilson, does not believe includes the separation of church and state.”

Asked if Hegseth’s performance of his duties might be influenced by the belief that, as Wilson put it in a 2022 blogpost, “We want our nation to be a Christian nation because we want all the nations to be Christian nations,” Davis said: “I can tell you that the reformed leaders around him … are all sincerely hoping that that is how he will view his mandate.”

The Guardian contacted Hegseth with questions about his beliefs on the separation of church and state, and sphere sovereignty, but received no reply.

Podcast

The podcast series, recorded for Pilgrim Hill’s Reformation Red Pill show, was ostensibly a discussion of Hegseth’s 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, co-written with David Goodwin. The book claims to reveal a “progressive plan to neutralize the basis of our republic” via public schools, core curriculums, and even rituals such as the pledge of allegiance, all of which stretches back at least a century.

Hegseth’s co-author, David Goodwin, is also the serving president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), an organization founded in Moscow, Idaho, which promotes and certifies “classical Christian” schools, and is closely associated with Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho, and a leading promoter of classical Christian education.

Both the John Edwards Classical Academy, which Hegseth’s children attend, and Franklin Classical School attended by Davis are affiliated with ACCS. Each is near Nashville, which Davis describes as “one of the cradles of the movement”, but Classical Christian Education has by now exploded nationwide. By his reckoning the number of schools affiliated to ACCS around the country has more than doubled in the last decade to 475.

The Guardian has reported extensively on how Wilson and the church he founded, Christ church, have sought to expand their influence in Moscow; how the church resisted Covid-19 public health mandates despite members pocketing government loans associated with the pandemic; and how figures associated with Christ church, including Wilson’s son, sought to expand their activities into the entertainment industry, including, apparently, mainstream children’s entertainment.

Wilson has also attracted broader criticism. Controversies have arisen from his apparent defense of slavery; his church’s handling of abuse accusations and the tolerance of convicted pedophiles in their ranks.

Wilson’s teachings include that “wives need to be led with a firm hand”, that “Christians do not set aside the death penalty for homosexual sin”, that “all the nations of man are to be brought into submission to Christ”, and that in a Christian nation, non-Christian religions would be banned from the public square.

In a discussion of sexuality, Wilson once wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”, adding: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

Earlier this month, Right Wing Watch reported that Wilson outlined his Christian nationalist objection to H1-B visas by saying: “That’s a lot of Hindus.”

In the first of the recorded episodes, Hegseth tells Haymes, the host, that writing the book with Goodwin led him to move his family to Tennessee so he could enroll them in a classical Christian school.

“The whole writing process was a red pill,” Hegseth says at one point, adding: “We moved to Tennessee to move to a classical Christian school because of this book. Because when I started writing it, we didn’t have all our kids in that form of education.”

Later, he adds: “We landed on one in middle Tennessee, and we moved to it. We thought we were moving to a school, but we moved to a church and a community and a whole view of the world that has changed the way we think, too.”

The church, Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, is in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, the same community where Hegseth in 2022 acquired a more than 8,800 sq ft house standing on over 76 acres for some $3.4m, according to Sumner County property records, MLS records, and data brokers.

The church is, in turn, a member of the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), another organization co-founded by Douglas Wilson, which unites a growing number of churches around the country who subscribe to Wilson’s theological vision.

In the recordings, Haymes or Hegseth directly and favorably quote Wilson at least three times, with Haymes praising his criticism of the concept of white privilege, and sharing his criticism of the founders for “not making our country distinctly Christian in the [founding] documents”, and Hegseth reporting that he would read a book from a rightwing Catholic publisher at Wilson’s recommendation…

-The Guardian

  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/24/trump-pete-hegseth-extremism?utm_term=679387c92bd9f84a10b449818baf2f53&utm_campaign=USMorningBriefing&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=usbriefing_email

 

Michelle Obama rewires America’s conversation on race with six words

 

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Michelle Obama coined one of the defining phrases of the political era: “When they go low, we go high.”

Going high did not work. Donald Trump won that election. While many of his supporters expressed discomfort with his go-low approach to politics, far more embraced it. Trump, despite his pedigree as a New York billionaire, would embarrass and attack and disparage the perceived elites, and many Americans loved him for it.

Lesson learned. In her speech Tuesday night at the 2024 Democratic convention, Obama didn’t explicitly revoke the “we go high” mantra, but she made clear that a different moment called for a different approach. It wasn’t that the former first lady went low, exactly, but she was unsparing in her disdain for and criticisms of her husband’s successor.

In one of the more memorable stretches of her speech, she equated the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, with the majority of Americans who never enjoyed Trump’s wealth and privilege — and the safety net that accompanies them.

Harris “understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” Obama said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No.

“We don’t get to change the rules, so we always win,” she continued. “If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work.”

Trump’s name wasn’t used but it didn’t need to be. That line about the escalator, a call back to Trump’s 2015 campaign launch, made the point obvious, if it wasn’t already.

But there are six words in that stretch that extend well beyond Trump. Obama used a phrase that succinctly and elegantly reframes the ongoing debate over inequality in the United States and how it might be addressed: “the affirmative action of generational wealth.”

It’s concise, centered on two familiar concepts. The first is “affirmative action,” the term used to describe programs generally focused on ensuring that non-White Americans have access to resources and institutions they might not otherwise have. And the second is “generational wealth,” the transition of economic (and social) power through families and, at times, communities.

These are descriptors of elements in American society that are in tension. If you are a recipient of generational wealth, you don’t need affirmative action to ensure you have access. If you are someone who would benefit from affirmative action, you generally are not someone with access to generational wealth. Of course, you might be, which is one of the outliers used to criticize affirmative action programs: They often center more on demographic traits than on economic class.

The linchpin of Obama’s phrase, though, is its shortest word: “of.” She isn’t contrasting affirmative action and generational wealth as conduits to power and success, she’s overlapping them. She’s noting that generational wealth is a form of affirmative action, here in the person of Trump but certainly beyond that.

How? Because generational wealth presents opportunities to people who might otherwise not have access to them: legacy admissions at Ivy League colleges, tutors and training, vehicles and housing that make entry-level jobs or internships more feasible. These are benefits that derive from social and economic class — a form of affirmative action. This is how reframing a subject works; it presents familiar information in a new context.

The natural response, of course, is that a parent bolstering her child’s success is different from a government program that includes an effort to ensure that Black Americans have equal access. But this is the point of the word “generational.” We’re not simply considering a rich parent and the advantages they might offer. We’re focused on patterns of wealth transitioning from parent to child over and over again. And those patterns, traced backward over surprisingly few decades, very quickly bring us back to racial divisions.

There is no question that Black and White Americans did not have equal access to economic success in the 1950s or 1960s. They didn’t in later decades, either, thanks to ongoing overt discrimination (like being unable to rent an apartment) and discriminatory patterns built in to lending and jobs systems (such as making it harder to obtain a mortgage for homes in some neighborhoods). 

Nearly every American has a parent or grandparent who was alive in the era of explicit discrimination — that’s two generations away. Generational wealth, then, almost necessarily means wealth rooted in an American economy where explicit discrimination existed. It also means wealth that still enjoys the sorts of systemic protections and advantages, including ones from the government, that are pilloried when focused on addressing historical inequality.

One of the central debates over race in recent years has centered on existence or extent of racism embedded in American social and legal systems. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, focused on systemic racism in law enforcement, increased the number of White Americans — specifically, White Democrats — who indicated that they thought discrimination was a central cause for the lower incomes and worse housing many Black Americans experience.

The biennial General Social Survey, reflecting Republicans’ broad rejection of the idea of systemic racism, finds that they are much more likely to indicate that Black Americans have worse economic positions due to lack of motivation.

Republicans reject the idea of systemic racism, in part, because they view it as an unfair and unpatriotic disparagement of the United States. It’s in part, too, because the narrative of America overcoming explicit racism during the Civil Rights movement suggests that the fight is over. Many point to Michelle Obama’s husband: How could racism exist in an America that elected a Black man as president?

It’s also in part because the Black Lives Matter movement and questions about racism in general are coded as Democratic issues and therefore subject to partisan response. Black Lives Matter led to the right embracing Blue Lives Matter. Discussions of systemic racism were met with many White Republicans viewing themselves as victims of anti-White racism (to Trump’s political benefit). Affirmative action programs became a useful target for demonstrating that sort of anti-White bias.

Michelle Obama knows this. Her line overlapping affirmative action and generational wealth wasn’t offering “affirmative action” as a pejorative term. It was, instead, contextualizing a different way in which people are boosted by circumstances that aren’t always under their control. It was a defense of affirmative action programs that noted how wealth built in an explicitly unfair economy was its own form of unearned advantage.

It was pointed at Trump, yes. But it’s a reframing that rewires the conversation of race and advantage in a striking way. In six words that will likely have more staying power, if not more success, than “we go high.”

-Philip Bump, The Washington Post