Showing posts with label Trump and Fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump and Fascism. Show all posts

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Misinformation Campaigns Against Survivors – Neil Brick

 
Misinformation Campaigns Against Survivors – Neil Brick


Child and ritual abuse survivors and their advocates have been attacked by misinformation campaigns the last several years. These campaigns use various harassment and propaganda techniques to distort the research and silence the efforts of those who are working to help trauma survivors and rape victims. These techniques will be compared to past and present public campaigns that have distorted information and used unethical tactics to manipulate public opinion. Propaganda and suggestion techniques used will be discussed and analyzed.

Neil Brick is a survivor of ritual abuse and mind control. His work continues to educate the public about child abuse, trauma and ritual abuse crimes. His child abuse and ritual abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. https://ritualabuse.us has been published for over 25 years. http://neilbrick.com

Today we will be comparing three different negative social movements. All three movements had different goals and different levels of popular support in their times. Comparisons of their techniques will be made.


For the purposes of this lecture, the term social movement will be defined as a group of people sharing common goals to effect social change.

 
1) Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945
2) Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020
3) The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases) – 2000 – 2020

Origins:

1) Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945: Some believe that the origins of Nazism include the historical belief in a unified Germany. A unified Germany developed in the mid 19th century. It was considered authoritarian and undemocratic. Nazism was also influenced by ethnic nationalism. (Volkisch groups) Some German nationalists were strong anti-semites.
https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/the-origins-of-nazism/

2) Modern American Right Wing Political Movement: The Republican party conservative and pro-business philosophies of the 20th century led to present day right wing political movement. Republicans often opposed progressive economic social programs, like the New Deal (Roosevelt), though at times moderates and conservative in the party clashed and fought for power. Far right social positions and anti-immigrant policies were endorsed by Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016 as president.

3) Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves – considers themselves to be “a clean break from LaVeyan Satanism.” “From the beginning, The Satanic Temple offered a stark contrast to the Church of Satan’s anti-altruistic philosophy of self interest.” The Satanic Temple endorses several political and social causes.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/what-is-the-difference-between-the-satanic-temple-and-the-church-of-satan

Misinformation and Propaganda:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

In 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote that propaganda’s
“task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.” Nazi propaganda was distributed through a wide variety of media and social channels. Jewish people in particular were the targets of Nazi propaganda and negative social policies which led to the Holocaust and murder of millions of Jewish people as well as others.
Film portrayed a large role in the development of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitism in Germany. Film and propaganda were used to cover up the atrocities and murders in the concentration camps.
Like many countries, propaganda was used to encourage public support of war.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda
Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
Fox News has been considered the right wing’s “Ministry of Truth.”
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-donald-trumps-ministry-truth-cia-analyst-1378208

From Orwell’s 1984: “The government puts into manufacturing its own version of reality, from rewriting history to producing propaganda to trying to remove as many words as possible from the English language to reduce people’s ability to think. Its main role is to help control the population through misinformation, outright lies and lack of information so that the state can maintain total power over the people.” https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/book-1984-what-was-main-role-ministry-truth-720

At times, the modern American right wing has been compared to Nazi Germany and other previous fascist movements. The American Alt-Right at times quotes Hitler and promotes racist and anti-Semitic philosophies. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases) – 2000 – 2020

The Grey Faction uses a wide variety of propaganda techniques to misrepresent the pro-survivor movement.

“….Collective or cultural gaslighting, pushing society at large to question the sanity of its members who perceive politics counter-hegemonically and question the falsified historiographies of the ruling class. A linchpin of this societal gaslighting is formed by mechanisms which trigger the attribution of the “conspiracist ideation” label to certain discourses and by efforts to cause certain discourses to become dominated by or associated with faulty conspiracist ideational reasoning.”

“….the allegation that someone is a “conspiracy theorist” is almost always a figurative way to charge them with faulty reasoning or, at the very least, to imply skepticism of their claims.”

“we have seen that Misicko often ridicules his opponents as believers in conspiracy theories related to “MK Ultra,” comparing them to believers in “UFO’s” and “Past Life Regression”

Cultural Gaslighting; or, “Falsified History Syndrome”


Propaganda and Mind Control:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

“The Nazi propaganda machine exploited ordinary Germans by encouraging them to be co-producers of a false reality….

Joseph Goebbels, the appointed minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany, once said: “There are two ways to make a revolution. You can blast your enemy with machine guns until he acknowledges the superiority of those holding the machine guns. That is one way. Or you can transform the nation through a revolution of the spirit …4”

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion.”….

Repetition

The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.”

Enemies

“Hitler understood, as few others had ever done, the need for the serial creation of enemies. He was a political entrepreneur possessed of the truly devastating insight that all recent enemies could eventually merge into the one super-enemy, the Jews.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/how-nazi-propaganda-encouraged-the-masses-to-co-produce-a-false-reality.html

 
Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
Fox News is Donald Trump’s ‘De Facto Ministry of Truth,’ Ex-CIA Analyst Says

“With Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other president in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation,” Taylor said.

Trump has made his appreciation of Fox News well known. The president regularly compliments the conservative network while bashing competitors including CNN and MSNBC.”
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-donald-trumps-ministry-truth-cia-analyst-1378208

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases) – 2000 – 2020

Name Calling

“The organization S.M.A.R.T is run by this little shit named Neil Brick, he’s actually when I first saw him, he’s this staggering little moron with this greasy combover and thick glasses, and he’s very short and very frail …” The Grey Faction repeatedly uses the term “quacks” to describe trauma practitioners.
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Exaggeration

“The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.”

The use of one event or occurrence to purposefully mischaracterize the work of an organization and movement. The Grey Faction does this frequently, looking for licensing complaints against therapists and taking quotes out of context to mischaracterize and malign trauma professionals.

Repetition

The Grey Faction repeats the same propaganda as prior pro-false memory organizations, calling survivors “crazy” “delusional” and “conspiracy theorists.” Use of term “Satanic Panic”

https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/


Enemies

Ritual abuse survivors and their helpers

Propaganda Film

“Mental Health Counselor Paranoid Presentation”
https://  youtu.be/btQaGxTp_m8

This video was taken and published without my permission at a Survivorship conference.

This video incredibly has scary music played in the background and mislabels my statements asking people not to use cult hand signals during the conference as “paranoid.”

This video purposefully mischaracterizes my work, including their attacks on my professional license, all of which failed.

False Analogy


“In the technique of false analogy, two things are compared that may or may not really be similar are presented as being similar. In most false analogies, there isn’t enough evidence available to support the comparison.

Mesner compares ritual abuse survivors to alien abductees. In this false comparison, he lists what he considers certain parallels between the two. Yet, this does not prove that either are the same. One can take any item or concept and then list hundreds of qualities and then take another item and do the same thing. Then one could make a short list of the similar qualities on these lists. This does not make either item similar, nor does it prove that ritual abuse memories are not real.”
http://neilbrick.com/articles/douglas-misicko-alias-douglas-mesner/

 
Bullying:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

Auschwitz Exhibition
@auschwitzxhibit
Before their killing nazis tried to dehumanize Jewish men and women in multiple ways. In these pictures, SS men forcing a Jew to bathe in a large basin in the street and German soldiers and local people watch a local man spray Jews with water before their murder at Kovno (1941)
https://twitter.com/auschwitzxhibit/status/1229561176968908801

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:

Trump’s Nicknames and the Psychology of Bullying By Ronald Pies, M.D.
“During and after the presidential campaign, Trump bestowed offensive nicknames on several of his opponents. There was, famously, “Crooked Hillary”, but there was also “Little Marco”, “Crazy Bernie” and “Lyin Ted” for Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Trump also repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” a jibe at her assertion of Native American heritage. More recently, Trump has given Sen. Chuck Schumer a series of nicknames, including “Head Clown,” “Fake Tears” and “Cryin’ Chuck.”
https://psychcentral.com/blog/trumps-nicknames-and-the-psychology-of-bullying/

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases) – 2000 – 2020

Mesner: “The conference is so self-evidently full of bullshit that exposing it may seem no more productive than pulling the false beard from a shopping mall Santa Claus. But, absurd as the premise of the S.M.A.R.T. conference is, and deranged as the speaker’s tales clearly are…”
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/harassment-by-false-memory-proponents/

 
Hate Speech and Hate Groups (including antisemitism):

“A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society. According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a hate group’s “primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization.”
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times. Its lies about Jews, which have been repeatedly discredited, continue to circulate today, especially on the Internet. The individuals and groups who have used the Protocols are all linked by a common purpose: to spread hatred of Jews.

The Protocols is entirely a work of fiction, intentionally written to blame Jews for a variety of ills. Those who distribute it claim that it documents a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. The conspiracy and its alleged leaders, the so-called Elders of Zion, never existed.”

“Beginning in 1920, auto magnate Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a series of articles based in part on the Protocols. The International Jew, the book that included this series, was translated into at least 16 languages. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, later head of the propaganda ministry, praised Ford and The International Jew.”

“Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg introduced Hitler to the Protocols during the early 1920s, as Hitler was developing his worldview. Hitler referred to the Protocols in some of his early political speeches, and, throughout his career, he exploited the myth that “Jewish-Bolshevists” were conspiring to control the world.

During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
“We won. America belongs to white men.” – Richard Spencer
Another clip recorded by Winkler — and a live stream of the entire event posted online by the school’s student newspaper, The Battalion — shows that Spencer went on to praise Donald Trump as “an alt-right hero” for reminding white Americans of what, he said, “makes the white race truly unique and truly wonderful.”

Richard Spencer praises Donald Trump as an alt-right hero
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/07/america-belongs-white-men-alt-right-founder-says/

Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

Fascism spread in 1930s America. It could spread again today.
“At the time, Jews served the same role for U.S. fascists that immigrants, Muslims and other minorities serve today: a vague but malicious threat they believed to be undermining America’s greatness. Surveys of U.S. public opinion from the 1930s are a startling reminder of just how widespread these attitudes became. As late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that 1 in 6 Americans thought Hitler was “doing the right thing” to the Jews. A 1940 poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national “menace” — more than any other group, including Germans. Almost a third anticipated “a widespread campaign against the Jews” — a campaign that 12 percent of Americans were willing to support.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-fascism-nazis-hitler-0170816-story.html

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020

Examples:
Where the Witch-Hunters are: Satanic Panic & Mental Health Malpractice

By Douglas Mesner and Sarah Ponto Rivera
“But where is Randy “L’il Knob” Noblitt today, now that social conditions aren’t nearly so amenable to the tin-foil hat Torquemada whose doctoral thesis was on The Celestial Concomitants of Human Behavior, more colloquially known as Astrology?”
(“Deeper Dive” Grey Faction Website)

Report from the S.M.A.R.T. Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control Conference 2009, Part 1
by doug — August 25, 2009
On the weekend of August 15-16, journalist Douglas Mesner (process.org) attended a conference for alleged victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. This is the first of his 2-part report:
“The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.”

Doug Mesner’s connection to the book “Might is Right”
“First published in 1890, it heavily advocates egoist anarchism, amorality, consequentialism and psychological hedonism. In Might Is Right, Redbeard rejects conventional ideas of human and natural rights and argues that only strength or physical might can establish moral right….

There are also controversial parts of the book that deal with race and male–female relations, claiming that the woman and the family as a whole are the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”

“The author and Doug at a book signing for Might Is Right, 2004…. Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple first showed up at my door over a decade ago. He wanted a copy of a book I had republished called Might Is Right. It was a 100-year-old tome, long forgotten by most, with the exception of Anton LaVey,… The release of this new version of Might Is Right became a phenomenon within the underground, and that is what brought the future leader of the Satanic Temple to my door. Only his name wasn’t Lucien Greaves at the time, it was Doug Mesner. (This isn’t the first time Doug has been connected with the Temple, though it is the first time he has publicly admitted his involvement.) When he first came to my home, Doug brought a stack of his drawings and writings with him. It was amazing stuff, and much to my surprise he left it with me. Not long after our first meeting, and after reviewing his sketchbooks at length, I reprinted a limited edition version of Might Is Right and asked Doug to illustrate the chapter headings for it. His work on the book was truly excellent.” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w7adn/unmasking-lucien-greaves-aka-doug-mesner-leader-of-the-satanic-temple
http://childabusedata.blogspot.com/2019/07/might-is-right-lucien-greaves-satanic.html

Anti-Semitism connected to Doug Mesner:

“Like, I think it’s okay to hate Jews if you hate them because they’re Jewish and they wear a stupid fuckin’ frisbie on their head [correct term: yarmulke or kippah] and walk around [and] think their God’s chosen people, but it’s not okay to hate somebody [‘born of Jewish blood’] just because their parents were stupid fuckin’ Jews and wore stupid frisbies on their head and thought the Jews were God’s chosen people […] Not everybody of Jewish blood is okay with me, it depends on if they follow the Jewish, uh… […] Satanic Jews are fine,” (Adam, “Doug Mesner [Lucien Greaves/Douglas Misicko] Satanic Temple Anti-Semitic Rant” (transcribed).”

On the Psychological Projection of Antisemitism by Satanists https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/
Doug Mesner (Lucien Greaves, Satanic Temple) Alleged Anti-Semitic Statements

https://www.videosprout.com/video?id=98aafea9-df67-416d-998d-46348a626005&fbclid=IwAR3uIHF8pl3sgLGCSsdJKyE9QJK3JpfH4j2H8DLhd1yYHuc_pPLFdPHIMtE

(audio excerpt)
Discusses several false memory movement attacks and hate speech allegations including Doug Mesner’s against survivors:
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

 
Harassment:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

“Through hundreds of legal measures, the Nazi-led German government gradually excluded Jews from public life, the professions, and public education. The goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and to create a climate of hostility and indifference toward their plight. On Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed in the first act of state-sponsored violence against the Jewish community. Many Jews who had the means tried to leave Germany but encountered countless bureaucratic hurdles.”

“The goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and encourage Germans to see Jews as dangerous outsiders in their midst. After 1935, everyday antisemitism was a regular part of carnival parades and floats. Public displays of antisemitism reinforced a climate of hostility toward Jews in Germany, or at the least, indifference to their treatment.”

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide/chapter-3/from-citizens-to-outcasts-1933-1938

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:

Neo-Nazi website founder owes $14 million to woman he urged readers to harass, judge says

Tanya Gersh said she and her family received threatening and horrifying messages for months after Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin encouraged a “troll storm.”

HELENA, Mont. — A judge on Thursday ordered the publisher of a neo-Nazi website to pay a Jewish real estate agent $14 million for inciting his readers to harass her family with hundreds of threatening and anti-Semitic messages and calls.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen entered Tanya Gersh a default judgment in her civil lawsuit after The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin refused to appear for a scheduled deposition in the case.
He ordered Anglin to pay Gersh over $4 million in compensatory damages, $10 million in punitive damages and told him to permanently remove all posts, comments and images about Gersh, her husband and son.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/neo-nazi-website-founder-owes-14-million-woman-he-urged-n1040671


The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases) – 2000 – 2020

Grey Faction, Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves Fact Sheet:
For over a decade Douglas Misicko using several aliases (including Douglas Mesner and Lucien Greaves) has harassed groups helping child abuse, rape and trauma survivors. He has also harassed groups providing research in support of child abuse, rape and trauma survivors.

In 2013, he and others created a group called the Satanic Temple. One part of this group is called the Grey Faction. The Grey Faction states they “invade” conferences. These conferences are provided to help and educate child abuse, rape and trauma survivors and their helpers.


Their representatives that invade these conferences misrepresent their reasons for attending these conferences. They film people at these conferences without permission and publish these films without the permission of those filmed. The Grey Faction repeatedly misrepresents the research and statements of the people at these conferences. It uses repeated ad hominem attacks against child abuse and trauma researchers without rebutting their research or stories.
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/grey-faction-satanic-temple-and-lucien-greaves-fact-sheet/

The website muckrock.com has been used by the Grey Faction to investigate and then attack clinicians working with cult survivors.
Petition to Stop Attacks Against Child Abuse and Ritual Abuse Survivors and Neil Brick
https://www.change.org/p/protect-child-abuse-survivors-petition-to-stop-attacks-against-child-abuse-and-ritual-abuse-survivors-and-neil-brick
Rebuttals to attacks, harassment and attacks on licensure.

Pseudoscience:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

“From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of “genetically diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry. With the patina of legitimacy provided by “racial” science experts, the Nazi regime carried out a program of approximately 400,000 forced sterilizations and over 275,000 euthanasia deaths that found its most radical manifestation in the death of millions of “racial” enemies in the Holocaust.
This campaign was based in part on ideas about public health and genetic “fitness” that had grown out of the inclination of many late nineteenth century scientists and intellectuals to apply the Darwinian concepts of evolution to the problems of human society. These ideas became known as eugenics and found a receptive audience in countries as varied as Brazil, France, Great Britain, and the United States. But in Germany, in the traumatic aftermath of World War I and the subsequent economic upheavals of the twenties, eugenic ideas found a more virulent expression when combined with the Nazi worldview that espoused both German racial superiority and militaristic ultranationalism.”
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-racial-science

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:

What does Trump actually believe on climate change?
US President Donald Trump’s position on climate change has been in the spotlight again, after he criticised “prophets of doom” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

At the event, which had sustainability as its main theme, and activist Greta Thunberg as its star guest, Mr Trump dismissed “alarmists” who wanted to “control every aspect of our lives” – while also expressing the US’s support for an initiative to plant one trillion trees.
If you judge the president based on his words alone, his views on climate change appear contradictory – and confusing.
He has called climate change “mythical”, “nonexistent”, or “an expensive hoax” – but also subsequently described it as a “serious subject” that is “very important to me”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213003

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Calling science psuedoscience:

1) Denial that memories can be repressed.
“The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry. It has provided the theoretical basis for ‘recovered memory therapy’ — the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.” Prof. Richard McNally” “ the scourge of repressed memory pseudoscience in mental health care” https://greyfaction.org/

Actual science:
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Recovered_Memories

https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/dissociative-amnesia-dsm–5-300.12-(f44.0)

“Dissociative amnesia (DA) is one of three dissociative disorders listed under DSM-V. The disorder involves the temporary loss of recall memory caused by disassociation, which may last for a period of seconds or years. The interruption in memory may be voluntary or involuntary and is most often a result of psychological trauma. DA involves episodic autobiographical memory loss inconsistent with normal forgetfulness. Episodic autobiographical information is associated with contextual information, such as what happened in the minutes leading up to a traumatic event. The individual may, however, remember semantic autobiographical information such as the date, time and weather conditions of the accident. Dissociative amnesia often arises from traumatic childhood events.”

2) Denial that DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) is caused by trauma.

Pope Interview

You’ve treated some thousand-odd patients, many of whom experienced extreme trauma, from what I understand –
Yes.

And you didn’t see evidence of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, otherwise known as Multiple Personality Disorder) in any of them?
I have seen a number of people who were diagnosed with DID, or where the patients themselves felt that they had DID, so it depends on what you mean by the question. In other words, there are certainly people that I’ve seen that were quite convinced that they did have different personalities that had amnesia for one another. But, even though it was “real” in the sense that the patients believed that they had it, I’m not convinced that it was real in the sense that it was a naturally occurring phenomenon, as opposed to something that had occurred through the power of suggestion. https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/pope-interview/

Actual science:
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Dissociative_Identity_Disorder

“Dissociative identity disorder. Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, this disorder is characterized by alternating between multiple identities. A person may feel like one or more voices are trying to take control in their head. Often these identities may have unique names, characteristics, mannerisms and voices. People with DID will experience gaps in memory of every day events, personal information and trauma…

Causes

Dissociative disorders usually develop as a way of dealing with trauma. Dissociative disorders most often form in children exposed to long-term physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Natural disasters and combat can also cause dissociative disorders.”
https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-conditions/dissociative-disorders

Conclusions

It could be stated that each of the three negative social movements above served a purpose (at least in part) to help the rich get richer.
Nazism was used to stop communism. The American Conservative Movement has been used to shift wealth from the poor and middle classes to the upper classes. The Grey Faction has been used to discredit those fighting cult abuse. Cults at times are used for sex trafficking, drug smuggling and other high profit activities.

All three negative social movements have used nefarious techniques to manipulate and control opinion and stifle accurate social debate through harassment and misrepresentation of facts. The Grey Faction has attacked theories regarding different forms of social suggestion, such as post hypnotic suggestion and the existence of certain cults and mind control techniques controlling different aspects of society.

Knowledge is power. It appears these groups share techniques causing harm to those around them. By exposing these techniques, we can develop healthy social movements meant to help and not hurt others.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Anti-fascism protests erupt across US as protesters blame Donald Trump for deadly white supremacist rally in Virginia



- Anti-fascism protests erupt across US as protesters blame Donald Trump for deadly white supremacist rally in Virginia
- Neo-nazis and white supremacists are celebrating Trump's remarks about the Charlottesville riots
- ‘Jews will not replace us’: Why white supremacists go after Jews
- Colonia Dignidad: German court upholds jail term in Chile child abuse case
- Trump approval falls to lowest level ever in Gallup poll
-  Leader of neo-Nazi group linked to Charlottesville attack was a US marine
- "If you're not resisting, you’re partaking": a historian on Trump's failure to call evil by its name
- Trump and Fascism : S.M.A.R.T.'s Ritual Abuse Pages
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/

Anti-fascism protests erupt across US as protesters blame Donald Trump for deadly white supremacist rally in Virginia
by Our Foreign Staff

14 August 2017

Protesters decrying hatred and racism converged around the country on Sunday, saying they felt compelled to counteract the white supremacist rally that spiralled into deadly violence in Virginia.

The gatherings spanned from a march to President Donald Trump's home in New York to candlelight vigils in several cities. In Seattle, police made arrests and confiscated weapons as Trump supporters and counter-protesters converged downtown.

Some focused on showing support for the people whom white supremacists condemn. Other demonstrations were pushing for the removal of Confederate monuments, the issue that initially prompted white nationalists to gather in anger this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. Still other gatherings aimed to denounce fascism and a presidential administration that organisers feel has let white supremacists feel empowered.

"People need to wake up, recognise that and resist it as fearlessly as it needs to be done," said Carl Dix, a leader of the Refuse Fascism group organising demonstrations in New York, San Francisco and other cities. "This can't be allowed to fester and to grow because we've seen what happened in the past when that was allowed."....
Helen Rubenstein, 62, was among hundreds of people who marched through downtown Los Angeles. She said her parents were Holocaust survivors, and she's worried that extremist views were becoming normal under Trump's presidency.

"I blame Donald Trump 100 percent because he emboldened all these people to incite hate, and they are now promoting violence and killing," Ms Rubenstein said.

Charlottesville descended into violence on Saturdayafter neo-Nazis, skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white nationalists gathered to "take America back" and oppose plans to remove a Confederate statue in the Virginia college town, and hundreds of other people came to protest the rally. The groups clashed in street brawls, with hundreds of people throwing punches, hurling water bottles and beating each other with sticks and shields....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/14/anti-fascism-protests-erupt-across-us-protesters-blame-donald/


Neo-nazis and white supremacists are celebrating Trump's remarks about the Charlottesville riots 
Natasha Bertrand     Aug. 12, 2017
The founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist website that considers itself a part of the alt-right, celebrated the fact that Trump "outright refused to disavow" the white nationalist rally and movement.

"People saying he cucked are shills and kikes," wrote the founder, Andrew Anglin. "He did the opposite of cuck. He refused to even mention anything to do with us. When reporters were screaming at him about White Nationalism he just walked out of the room."

"Clearly President Trump is condemning the real haters: the SJW/Marxists who've attacked our guys,"  said one  commenters on the far-right, pro-Trump subreddit called r/The_Donald.

"Marxist" and "SJW," or social justice warrior, are terms frequently used by the far-right to describe liberals.

"So glad GEOTUS called this bulls--t out for what it really is," said another commenter, using an acronym to refer to Trump that stands for "God Emperor of the United States.'"
http://www.businessinsider.com/neo-nazis-celebrate-trumps-remarks-about-charlottesville-riots-2017-8 

‘Jews will not replace us’: Why white supremacists go after Jews
By Yair Rosenberg August 14, 2017....
When white nationalists descended upon the historic Virginia city to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, their “Unite the Right” rally gathered a veritable who’s who of top neo-Nazis in the United States, including Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and alt-right leading light Richard Spencer, among others....
They immediately went after the Jews. At their Friday night rally at the University of Virginia, the white nationalists brandished torches and chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans, including “blood and soil” (an English rendering of the Nazi “blut und boden”) and “Jews will not replace us” — all crafted to cast Jews as foreign interlopers who need to be expunged. The attendees proudly displayed giant swastikas and wore shirts emblazoned with quotes from Adolf Hitler. One banner read, “Jews are Satan’s children.”

“The truth is,” Duke told a large crowd Saturday, “the American media, and the American political system, and the American Federal Reserve, is dominated by a tiny minority: the Jewish Zionist cause.” Addressing another group, Richard Spencer mocked Charlottesville’s Jewish mayor, Mike Signer. “Little Mayor Signer — ‘See-ner’ — how do you pronounce this little creep’s name?” Spencer asked. The crowd responded by chanting, “Jew, Jew, Jew.” In TV interviews, attendees were not shy about their anti-Semitism.

And James Fields Jr., the man who is accused of mowing down protesters that day, killing one and injuring 19, “had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” according to his high school history teacher. He was previously photographed at a rally for Vanguard America, a neo-Nazi group dedicated to fighting “the international Jew.”....

Inspired by Donald Trump, Duke himself ran for Senate in Louisiana, spending much of his time on the primary debate stage ranting against the Jews. When Melania Trump was found to have plagiarized Michelle Obama in her Republican National Convention address, Duke declared he’d “bet a gefilte fish” that it was Jewish sabotage.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump’s alt-right supporters barraged Jewish journalists with online abuse, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe and me, photoshopping us into gas chambers and concentration camps....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/  


Colonia Dignidad: German court upholds jail term in Chile child abuse case
A German man who fled Chile after being sentenced to five years in prison for child sex abuse must serve his sentence in Germany. Hartmut Hopp was part of the notorious Colonia Dignidad enclave.
Date 14.08.2017
Harmut Hopp - who helped run the notorious Colonia Dignidad colony in Chile - must serve the five-year jail sentence handed to him by a Chilean judge, a German court in Krefeld ruled on Monday.

Hopp was sentenced in Chile back in 2011 for 16 counts of aiding the sexual abuse of children over several decades. However, he managed to flee to Germany before the sentence took legal effect, living freely in the western town of Krefeld....
Hopp is widely thought to have been among the closest associates of Paul Schäfer, the founder of the Colonia Dignidad enclave.

Schäfer, a German lay preacher, former Nazi soldier and convicted pedophile, fled Germany to Chile after World War II and founded the colony in the 1960s. Located in a remote mountainous region around 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the capital Santiago, the colony was intended to project an image of harmonious and communal living. At its peak, hundreds of German immigrants resided there.

However, allegations of child sex abuse soon emerged, after a number of former residents managed to escape the heavily-guarded enclave. However, Colonia Dignidad was allowed to continue to run with relative impunity, thanks to key political links enjoyed by its leaders. As well as being the scene for decades of child sex abuse, reports later uncovered that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had used the colony to torture and kill political dissidents. Residents are alleged to have taken part in the torture.

Following Chile's democratic transition in 1990, officials began investigating the alleged abuses. Schäfer fled to Argentina after child sex abuse charges were filed against him. He wasn't arrested until 2005, and was finally sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2006. He died in prison four years later at the age 88....
http://www.dw.com/en/colonia-dignidad-german-court-upholds-jail-term-in-chile-child-abuse-case/a-40089137 

Leader of neo-Nazi group linked to Charlottesville attack was a US marine

Dillon Hopper, the self-styled ‘commander’ of the Vanguard America group that attacker James Fields marched with, was a sergeant in the US marine corps
Dillon Hopper served in Afghanistan and Iraq. His active duty with the marines ended in January this year.
Jon Swaine and Lois Beckett  Monday 14 August 2017

The leader of the neo-Nazi group that James Fields marched with in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday before allegedly killing a protester with his car served in the US marine corps until earlier this year.

Dillon Hopper, the self-styled “commander” of Vanguard America, is a recently retired marine staff sergeant and veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Members of his white supremacist group marched in Virginia last weekend.

Hopper, 29, has been using his former name, Dillon Irizarry, when appearing in public for Vanguard America. But he officially changed his name to Dillon Ulysses Hopper in November 2006, according to court records in his native New Mexico.

Hopper’s active duty with the marines ended in January this year, according to a Department of Defense record. He has lived in California and Ohio since returning to the US. Hopper’s full service record could not immediately be obtained. His Facebook avatar is currently a cartoon image of Donald Trump building a wall.

Hopper and Vanguard America did not respond to messages seeking comment. Hopper’s identity was first reported by Splinter.

Fields, a 20-year-old military bootcamp dropout from Maumee, Ohio, has been charged with crimes including murder after allegedly driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people in Charlottesville who were demonstrating against the far-right. The crash killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured about 20 others....

Fields had been photographed standing among members of Vanguard America earlier in the day. He was pictured holding a shield bearing the group’s logo and was wearing the same distinctive outfit – white polo shirt and khakis – as many Vanguard members. The group has said, however, that Fields is not a member.

Vanguard America is only about a year old. It is one of a handful of new white supremacist organizations that are attempting to radicalize young white men across the country. Its manifesto is racist and its website URL references the Nazi slogan “blood and soil”. The group bars people who are not of white European heritage....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/14/charlottesville-attack-vanguard-america-james-fields-dillon-hopper




"If you're not resisting, you’re partaking": a historian on Trump's failure to call evil by its name
The president had a chance to take a stand against fascism. He didn’t.
Updated by Sean Illing  Aug 14, 2017

“This was our Beer Hall Putsch. This was the beginning of our revolution.”

Thus concluded a post on the Daily Stormer, a popular American neo-Nazi website in which the author, Andrew Anglin, recapped the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend.

The original “Beer Hall Putsch” was the first Nazi spectacle in 1923. It was modeled explicitly after Mussolini’s March on Rome. The putsch was an attempt by Hitler, the leader of the nascent Nazi Party, to seize power from the German government by marching to the center of Munich, alongside 2,000 fellow Nazis.

The putsch failed, amounting to little more than a crazed mob. Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. But the event became central to Hitler’s rise, as he used the subsequent trial to perform fiery speeches that were printed and reprinted in German newspapers.

On Sunday, I reached out to Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history at Yale University. Snyder has made a career of studying the history of 20th century fascism, and earlier this year released a book titled On Tyranny, a tightly argued warning about the dangers of encroaching American fascism.

I wanted to know what he thought about the events this weekend in Charlottesville, about the fact that the self-described alt-right protesters were shouting chants like “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil” (the latter a direct reference to Nazi ideology), and about President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to condemn white supremacy in clear terms.

“There are moments,” he told me, “when there isn't a gray zone, when there isn't really room for nuance, where if you're not resisting, you’re partaking.” Saturday was one such moment, and Trump’s insistence that the violence is “on many sides” was a missed opportunity to take a stand against an emergent threat....

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/14/16141078/charlottesville-unite-the-right-nazi-history-timothy-snyder


Trump approval falls to lowest level ever in Gallup poll
By Robin Eberhardt - 08/14/17
President Trump’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest level ever in a Gallup tracking poll.

The president's approval rating is only 34 percent in the latest Gallup average released Monday, while 61 percent of adults disapprove of the president's performance, also a new high.

Trump's approval rating has dropped at a time when he has taken heavy criticism for not explicitly calling out white supremacists and neo-Nazis in a statement condemning violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.

The president did damage control on Monday, delivering a statement from the White House where he denounced white supremacists by name.

“Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to what we hold dear as Americans,” Trump said....
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/346487-trump-approval-falls-to-lowest-level-ever-in-gallup-poll 

Trump and Fascism : S.M.A.R.T.'s Ritual Abuse Pages
This page is a data dump of articles about Donald Trump, those working with Trump and historical articles about fascism. Fascism uses different types of mind control to control people. Donald Trump has been accused of using propaganda and mind control techniques to win the election, to control people’s opinions of him and to control their opinions of other topics. This page contains excerpts from articles related to this topic.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Trump and Fascism - Articles about Trump, Fascism, Mind Control and Propaganda  

Trump and Fascism - Articles about Trump, Fascism, Mind Control and Propaganda
 
Trump and Fascism

This page is a data dump of articles about Donald Trump, those working with Trump and historical articles about fascism. Fascism uses different types of mind control to control people. Donald Trump has been accused of using propaganda and mind control techniques to win the election, to control people’s opinions of him and to control their opinions of other topics. This page contains excerpts from articles related to this topic. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/


"Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous," he said.


Befehl ist Befehl

Nazis weren't just following orders but 'took pride' in atrocities
A new study suggests that those who carry out atrocities, like Nazi concentration camp guards, weren't just following orders but actively enjoyed their work. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9694194/Nazis-werent-just-following-orders-but-took-pride-in-atrocities.html

 A new study has shown that terrible acts involve not just obedience, but enthusiasm too.

The scientific paper - jointly authored by by a Scottish university professor - challenges a long-held belief that human beings harm others because they are programmed to obey orders.

Professor Stephen Reicher, Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and Professor Alex Haslam of the University of Queensland, Australia, have published the paper in the journal PLos-Biology on the nature of tyranny and evil.

It comes 50 years after social psychological studies showed that even decent people can engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others.

The beliefs can be traced back to two research study conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in the 1960s and early 1970s.

 Milgram's research showed that people blindly obey the orders of an authority figure, while Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) revealed that people will take on abusive roles uncritically.

But, after a decade-long program of research, Reicher and Haslam have challenged the conclusions of both.

Professor Reicher said: "In short, people do harm not because they are unaware that they are doing wrong, but because they believe that they are doing right.

"It is this conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work, and that makes them act energetically and creatively to ensure its success."

The study began when the two researchers ran their own prison experiment, which was broadcast by the BBC in 2002. This showed that people did not automatically slip into role.

They found the guards only acted tyrannically when they believed that harsh measures were necessary to create order.

More recently, Professors Reicher and Haslam have conducted a series of studies which revisit Milgram's conclusions.

These show that people only go along with an authority when they believe that they are serving a greater good.

Paradoxically, they show that giving orders tends to undermine this belief and hence undermines obedience.

Although the findings of Zimbardo and Milgram remain highly influential, Professor Haslam suggests their conclusions do not hold up well under scrutiny.

"Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous," he said.

 
 
Stephen Miller’s authoritarian declaration: Trump’s national security actions ‘will not be questioned’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/13/stephen-millers-audacious-controversial-declaration-trumps-national-security-actions-will-not-be-questioned

MILLER: Well, I think that it's been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is -- is -- is beyond anything we've ever seen before.

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Meet the White Nationalist Trying To Ride The Trump Train to Lasting Power
Alt-right architect Richard Spencer aims to make racism cool again. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist

Several weeks after this story published in October, Spencer gave a triumphant speech at a conference in Washington describing America as a "white country" and proclaiming, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" He was met with cheers and Nazi salutes. Read more in our investigation of how the white nationalist movement capitalized on the Trump campaign.

After graduating high school in 1997, Spencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double-majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theater, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche made a lasting impression; Spencer found his critiques of equality and democracy darkly compelling. He identified with the German philosopher's unapologetically elitist embrace of "great men" such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet Spencer found little in Nietzsche about the organization of the state; it was only after entering the humanities master's program at the University of Chicago that he discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed "race realist" who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society.


 
White Nationalists See Trump as Their Troll in Chief. Is He With Them
  Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/trump-white-nationalists-hate-racism-power
Trump "may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people," remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a "race realist" site called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank that became notorious for declaring that blacks are "more dangerous" than whites.
 
Donald Trump’s Vanity Is Destroying His Presidency

The presidency isn’t changing Donald Trump. It’s revealing who he has always been. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/donald-trump-vanity-destroying-presidency
Americans witnessed this childish display throughout the 2016 campaign and, it seems, his fans approved. They cheered his rhetorical assault on the establishment, the status quo, bien-pensant thinking and sensibilities. Trump’s core support never wavered, even when he ripped into the looks of Alicia Machado, or dismissed allegations of sexual harassment by claiming his accusers were not attractive enough to warrant his attention, or when he retweeted an image contrasting a less-than-flattering photo of Ted Cruz’s wife with a stunning shot of his wife, Melania (his third spouse, all three of whom were former models).

This translates into a fixation on how Trump himself is perceived, too. That’s why he could not stop talking about how well he was doing in polls and how many people showed up to his rallies. It’s why he insisted that Mexicans loved him even as he called them “rapists” and repeatedly promised to build a wall to keep “bad hombres” out of the United States. Only Trump alone would be able to save the American people from the dismal picture he painted of the state of the nation, because he was the smartest, the best deal-maker, the most respected, he would say. Perhaps this is why, too, as his doctor admitted in a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump takes a prostate-related drug, Propecia, to ward off male-pattern baldness.
 

Trump has another 'new plan' that was used by the Nazis against Jews in the 1930s
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/2/1629126/-Trump-has-another-new-plan-that-was-used-by-the-Nazis-against-Jews-in-the-1930s
On the White House website, inside of the press releases concerning Trump/Bannon executive actions you will find this “Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” In it, a list of immigrant crimes to be made and updated regularly and given to the public for consumption is ordered.

Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.


 
White nationalist movement growing much faster than Isis on Twitter, study finds


Twitter users who self-identify as white nationalists and Neo-Nazis have grown 600 per cent since 2012, according to a new study
  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/white-nationalist-movement-twitter-faster-growth-isis-islamic-state-study-a7223671.html


 
Progressives Push New York Attorney General To Investigate Trump


February 15, 2017
Peter Overby 

President Trump today at the White House. The New York attorney general says Democratic AGs are considering challenging state corporate charters of the president's businesses.
 
A liberal advocacy group on Wednesday called upon New York State to investigate whether the Trump Organization has engaged in fraud and illegal activity, and consider revoking its corporate charter.

The request is not falling on deaf ears.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman provided no specifics but told NPR a charter challenge is indeed part of a broader discussion among Democratic attorneys general about President Trump's business holdings.

"Our goal here is not to scramble around looking for ways to get Trump," he said of the Democratic AGs' strategy, but "there will be litigation relating to his [Trump's] failure to divest."

His comments came after a group called Free Speech For People presented Schneiderman's office with a 24-page letter, outlining concerns about the Trump company's past legal infractions, including settlements involving housing discrimination charges in the 1970s and recent fraud allegations involving Trump University.

It also raises questions about whether Trump might be receiving foreign payments in ways that would violate the U.S. Constitution.

Here's the issue: As a businessman, Trump has financial interests in hundreds of companies spread over about 20 countries, all grouped together under the Trump Organization umbrella. And as president, Trump could make policy decisions that could enhance the value of his businesses, creating ethical conflicts.

The Free Speech For People letter reads: "By continuing to operate under Trump family ownership and control with President Trump in the White House, the Trump Organization flagrantly abuses its state-granted powers, contrary to the public policies of New York against corruption and conflicts of interest, and contrary to the U.S. Constitution."

The group's outside counsel Jonathan Abady said in a conference call that "the president is converting the Oval Office into his own personal candy store."

Trump has taken no steps to sell off his business interests to end the conflicts, although he has been filing legal paperwork to remove himself from management of his New York-based company, which owns real estate, golf, hotel and other businesses. He has turned over management to his two oldest sons.

Ethics experts say that to be free of conflicts of interest, Trump should sell off his holdings. But Schneiderman said of the Trump family, "It's not clear to anybody what their plan is going forward to remove these entanglements." http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/15/515446176/progressives-push-new-york-attorney-general-to-investigate-trump

  
American Institutions Are Pushing Back Against Trump


The bureaucracy, the press, the judiciary, and the public are not only pushing back, they’re having some success.

Nothing Donald Trump has done since becoming President is particularly surprising. The attacks on judges and the press, the clash of civilizations worldview, the ignorance of public policy, the blurring of government service and private gain, the endless lying, the incompetence, the chaos—all were vividly foreshadowed during the campaign. The Republican-led  Congress’ refusal to challenge Trump was foreseeable too. The number of Republicans willing to oppose Trump’s agenda pretty much equals the number who refused to endorse him once he became the GOP nominee.

What Does It Mean to Have 'Repeated Contacts' With Russian Intelligence?

Less predictable has been the response of other elements of the American political system: The bureaucracy, the press, the judiciary and the public. Here, the news is good. So far, they’re not only pushing back, they’re having some success.

The latest example is the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Flynn’s resignation is a welcome development both because he held crudely bigoted views of Muslims and because he was unable to competently manage the foreign policy process. But that’s not why he lost his job. He lost his job because of an independent bureaucracy and a vigorous press.

CNN’s Brian Stelter has reconstructed the chain of events. On January 12, a “senior U.S. government official” told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that, “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the [Russian] hacking” of the presidential election. Three days later, CBS’ John Dickerson asked Vice President Mike Pence about the call, and Pence insisted that Flynn had not discussed “anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”

But the Washington Post followed up, citing “nine current and former officials” who claimed that Flynn had discussed exactly that. The New York Times reported that there was a transcript of the call. Eventually, it became impossible to deny that Flynn had lied, and caused Pence to lie. If the Trump administration had been able to deny reality, as it so often does, Flynn would likely still have his job. But good reporters, aided by government sources, made that impossible. As the Columbia Journalism Review notes, “it wasn’t the lying that got him [Flynn] fired; it’s that his lying leaked to the press”

Another leak to the Times forced the Trump administration to abandon an executive order re-opening the CIA “black sites” that the Bush administration used to torture suspected terrorists. And according to the Times, it was a leak that alerted Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to a draft executive order repealing protections for LGBT federal employees, which they then quashed. Trump and his top advisors are so alarmed by the leaks that, according to Politico, they’re searching the phones and computers of NSC staff.

But no president faced with a dissatisfied bureaucracy and a vigorous press has been able to keep the internal workings of government secret. And Trump is facing the most energized American press corps in decades. America’s prestige newspapers have seen dramatic increases in circulation over the last year. The Post alone recently announced that it was hiring sixty new journalists.  Trump, in Jack Shafer’s words, “is making journalism great again,” and great journalism is, to some degree, restraining his power.
 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/american-institutions-are-fighting-back-against-trump/516759/
 
Donald Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn Has Called Islam 'a Cancer'


The man whom President-elect Donald Trump picked as his national security adviser has said he doesn’t believe that all cultures are “morally equivalent” and once described Islam as "a cancer," comments that have many in the Muslim community worried about what his new job might mean for them.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn served as an adviser to Trump on national security and foreign policy throughout the presidential campaign. Flynn has said he agreed with Trump's initial proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, but told Al Jazeera earlier this year it likely "wouldn't work," and that he supports the vetting of Muslims coming from Syria and places where terrorism is a major threat.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-mike-flynn-called/story?id=43575658
 

Impeach Trump: Ohio Republican judge

We can't let him get away with the 'dozens of dazzlingly illegal things Trump has already done.'

A president of the United States, on the official @POTUS Twitter feed, assails a department store for dropping his daughter’s merchandise. On the same day, the Pentagon is looking to rent space in the Trump Tower. Trump’s son travels to Uganda to make a Trump business deal. And, of course, foreign diplomats will stay at the Trump Hotel. The cash comes marching in.

The phony legalisms Trump has said he used to “separate” himself from his businesses – though he still owns them and his sons are running them – will be cited to make this all acceptable. Horsefeathers. No ethical expert could say with a straight face that this is not a classic conflict of interest.

In any time except our post-factual era, no office holder, much less the president, could get away with any one of the dozens of dazzlingly illegal things Trump has already done. They would forfeit office immediately.

The leader of the band of Mad Hatters occupying the White House has already insulted allied world leaders, issued illegal and badly written orders, impugned a “so-called” judge appointed by his own party, and appointed the least-qualified cabinet ever. The first secretary of state was Thomas Jefferson. Trump appointed a big-oil executive with close ties to Russia. The first treasury secretary was Alexander Hamilton. Trump appointed a former Goldman Sachs exec who got rich foreclosing on homeowners. The national security advisor lasted 24 days.

Basic American values — free speech, the rule of law, separation of powers, even common decency — are unknown in this White House. We now have a president who has no concept of separation of powers, or why we have three branches of government. If he knew anything about the Constitution, he would know the framers envisioned just the situation we have now — a would-be dictator. They provided checks and balances — such as an independent judiciary to protect us from presidential tyranny.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/02/15/trump-impeach-flynn-ivanka-tweet-russia-column/97944818/
 

Trump's secretary of labor pick Andrew Puzder withdraws nomination

   Puzder came under scrutiny after admitting earlier this month that he had employed an undocumented worker for years and revelations that his ex-wife alleged in 1990 that he abused her. She has since withdrawn those allegations, and Puzder — whose confirmation hearing was set for tomorrow after being rescheduled four times — has denied wrongdoing.

Puzder's withdrawal marks the first unsuccessful nomination of the Trump administration. Eleven of his 23 Cabinet-level picks are yet to be confirmed.

President Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, has formally withdrawn himself from consideration for the position, Puzder announced Wednesday — a rare move for a Cabinet-level pick.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-secretary-labor-pick-andrew-puzder-withdraws-nomination/story?id=45517721