Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see an even chance of scattered thunderstorms and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 13h 55m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill announce in a joint declaration the Atlantic Charter. On this day in 1864, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry joins Union forces in an expedition to Jasper, Georgia.
Recommended for reading in full —
In November, before the election, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes wrote of CVE [Countering Violent Extremism] for White People: The Trumpist Movement and the Radicalization Process:
….But Trumpism doesn’t simply provide—like certain Islamisms—an ideational platform on which radicalization can take place. It also provides key aspects of the crucial social networks for very large numbers of people. Nazis and white supremacists have always been able to find each other online, but unless you visited their particular corners of the web, they had very little way to reach you. They were a relatively small group of people speaking almost entirely to themselves.
Trump has changed that. Now white supremacists and alt-righters are a small group of people in a giant stadium, doing the wave in the bleachers with Sieg Heils. Everyone in the stadium gets to see them, particularly because the Trump campaign often puts them on the Jumbotron by retweeting them or refusing to repudiate them. Notoriously, in January, Trump retweeted a message from a user with the Twitter handle “@WhiteGenocideTM,” a reference to a widespread white supremacist meme. Later in the campaign, Trump also refused for days to conclusively repudiate David Duke’s endorsement of his candidacy.
What’s more, if you follow Donald Trump’s own Twitter feed, you inevitably get exposed to a steady diet of the hardest-core white supremacists as they fawningly reply to him. Even if you don’t follow Trump, you see those people attacking the journalists and commentators you do follow. And if you attend Trump’s rallies or watch clips of them online, you can find other Trump supporters chanting slogans like “Jew-S-A.” A recent video shows one rally attendee in Cleveland coaching another through calling reporters members of the “Lügenpresse”—a Nazi phrase meaning “lying press”….
T. Rees Shapiro, Alice Crites, Laura Vozzella and John Woodrow Cox reports that the Alleged driver of car that plowed into Charlottesville crowd was a Nazi sympathizer, former teacher says:
The alleged driver, James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old who traveled to Virginia from Ohio, had espoused extremist ideals at least since high school, according to Derek Weimer, a history teacher.
Weimer said he taught Fields during his junior and senior years at Randall K. Cooper High School in Kentucky. For a class called “America’s Modern Wars,” Fields wrote a deeply researched paper about the Nazi military during World War II, Weimer recalled.
“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” the teacher said. “He had white supremacist views. He really believed in that stuff.”
Fields’s research project into the Nazi military was well written, Weimer said, but it appeared to be a “big lovefest for the German military and the Waffen-SS.”
Jena McGregor reports that Trump fires back after the CEO of Merck resigned from his manufacturing council:
The chief executive of Merck said Monday in a tweet that he was resigning from President Trump’s American Manufacturing Council, saying he was doing so “as CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience” and that “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy.”
In the statement, Kenneth C. Frazier, one of the few African American CEOs in the Fortune 500, said “I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism” and touted the power of diversity. “Our country’s strength stems from its diversity and the contributions made by men and women of different faiths, races, sexual orientations and political beliefs.”
Within an hour after the statement was first issued, Trump tweeted his response. “Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”….
(Trump’s chances of finding a way to lower drug prices are about the same as his chances of flying to the moon by flapping his arms; his tweets are persuasive only to those who are gullible, ignorant, or dense. Frazier did the right thing.)
The New York Times, in an editorial, sees Trump rightly for The Hate He Dares Not Speak Of:
Let’s discard the fiction that President Trump wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly to the neo-Nazi violence that killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterdemonstrator in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. The neo-Nazis heard his message loud and clear….
Mr. Trump is alone in modern presidential history in his willingness to summon demons of bigotry and intolerance in service to himself. He began his political career on a lie about President Barack Obama’s citizenship and has failed to firmly condemn the words and deeds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan leaders and other bigots who rallied behind him. A number of these people, including David Duke, the former Klan imperial wizard, and Richard Spencer, self-styled theorist of the alt-right, were part of the amen chorus of bigots in Charlottesville.
“We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,” said Mr. Duke, whose support Mr. Trump has only reluctantly disavowed in the past. “That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump”….
Here are the biggest myth about sharks, debunked: