Time to Pick Sides
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Women take the lead: Three top female business executives—Indra Nooyi of Pepsi, Mary Barra of GM and Virginia Rometty of IBM catalyzed the collapse of Trump’s “Strategic and Policy Forum,” triggering a group conference call among a dozen business leaders where they agreed to disband, David Gelles, Landon Thomas, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Kate Kelly report for The New York Times. Soon thereafter, the little Twitler announced that he was dissolving that group as well as his Manufacturing Council.
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It’s fair to say that the collapse of Trump’s mainstream business support proves that organized consumer pressure matters. “There is continuing pressure on C.E.O.s from customers, employees, shareholders and board members to take a position against what’s going on and separate themselves from president Trump’s councils,” Bill George, the former chief executive of the medical device maker Medtronic and a board member of Goldman Sachs, told the New York Times. “These executives cannot live with customers thinking they are in cahoots with someone who supports white supremacists or neo-Nazis.” Shannon Coulter and #GrabYourWallet, take a bow.
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PayPal and Discover have agreed to demands led by groups like Color of Change that they stop processing payments to more than three dozen right-wing extremist groups, CBS Moneywatch’s Jonathan Berr reports. “Regardless of the individual or organization in question, we work to ensure that our services are not used to accept payments or donations for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance,” PayPal said in a statement. (Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center had reportedon how PayPal was integral to the fundraising for the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, even though the company’s acceptable use policy explicitly bans “the promotion of hate, violence [and] racial intolerance.”) Color of Change’s BloodMoney.org site is tracking more than 100 groups and the companies enabling their online fundraising.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook denounced Trump’s bigotry and announced the company is donating $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, and matching two-for-one employee donations to those groups and others. He also said iTunes would offer users a simple way to donate to the center. The company is also disabling payment support to sites selling white supremacist products, BuzzFeed reports.
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Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush issued a joint statement condemning racial bigotry, anti-Semitism and hatred in all forms. How very brave of them.
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The commanders of all the military branches also issued statements denouncing racism and bigotry.
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The editors of USA Today are calling on Congress to formally censure Trump. So is MoveOn (which has also called for his impeachment.)
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The CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, explains why his company has kicked the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer, off its service—which means the hate site is no longer protected from DDOS attacks.
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Longtime Civic Hall member Erin Mazursky, the founder of Rhize.org, writes that, in the wake of President Trump’s defense of the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, “There comes a time in every generation where we must, indeed, pick sides.” (I’d add, while it is really tempting to ask people what took them so long, far better to just smile and say, welcome aboard.)
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Fascists coming to march in your town? Longtime social justice organizer Cleve Jones shares this suggestion borrowed from a town in Germany: sponsor marchers and donate to racial justice organizations for every mile they walk, then show up and cheer them on for helping good causes.
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If you have 20 minutes and aren’t triggered by fairly graphic violence as well as White supremacists openly bragging about their racism, watch this documentary by Elle Reeve for Vice on the confrontation in Charlottesville.
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Self-care: The People’s Supper has released a guidebook for gathering post-Charlottesville, called “Collective Care in the Face of Violent Trauma.“
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Trump watch: Quintupling down on his open embrace of white supremacy, the little Twitter tweeted this morning that it was “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments….[and] the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” An email circulating among allies of President Trump that was shared by his personal lawyer, John Dowd, claims that “there is literally no difference” between secessionist General Robert E. Lee and the country’s founder George Washington, report Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo for The New York Times. The email, written by a conspiracy theorist named Jerome Almon, also says that Black Lives Matter is run by terrorists.
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This is the second time in recent days that evidence has surfaced of top Trump officials espousing conspiracy theories about the left; last week Foreign Policy published a seven-page memo written by a National Security staffer named Rich Higgins that alleged that Trump was being attacked by a wide-ranging conspiracy masterminded by the Muslim Brotherhood and cultural Marxists along with the ACLU, Black Lives Matter and several Muslim-American advocacy groups. Higgins was fired, but not before Donald Trump Jr. reportedly showed the memo to his father the President, “who gushed over it,” Foreign Policy reported.
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A Ukrainian hacker who allegedly wrote some of the software that has been identified in the DNC hack has now become a witness for the FBI, Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins report for The New York Times.
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Media matters: The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard has released a new report on the role of online media in the 2016 election, coauthored by Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler. Among their key findings—not only did coverage of Trump outpace Hillary Clinton, her coverage focused on scandals while his focused on his core issues of immigration, jobs and trade. Immigration and Muslims were mentioned more often than jobs, race, trade, guns, health care and climate change. Breitbart is the new nexus of conservative media, outperforming Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Breitbart’s key role was especially pronounced in coverage of immigration; on Twitter its immigration stories were shared twice as often as The Guardian, which ranked second for that topic.
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The report’s authors also argue that the problem of so-called “fake news” of the sort associated with Macedonian teens gaming Facebook’s NewsFeed algorithms to earn ad revenues is overstated, and the deeper problem is rooted in the rise of an in-group identity made up of millions of Americans who share racist, populist, anti-science, anti-rule-of-law and anti-journalism world views.
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Life inside Facebookistan: Yesterday CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a statement decrying neo-Nazis (but not mentioning Trump) and declaring “There is no place for hate in our community. That’s why we’ve always taken down any post that promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism — including what happened in Charlottesville. With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm. We won’t always be perfect, but you have my commitment that we’ll keep working to make Facebook a place where everyone can feel safe.”
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Attend: #WhatWeDoNow: Can We Escape Technology’s Selective Reach, a book talk by Ramesh Srinivasan, author of the new book Whose Global Village, in conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck, here at Civic Hall on August 24. RSVP to save your seat.
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