Hillary Clinton is speaking out about the recent police shooting of unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher, in Oklahoma. And she has a strong message about just who can help end these kinds of deadly encounters. RELATED: The revolution may not be televised, but it surely will be tweeted Watch the video The Democratic presidential candidate phoned…
Mounting evidence suggests Donald Trump illegally used money donated by others to his foundation to pay his personal legal bills -- and Seth Meyers laid out the possible criminal case against him.
The Republican presidential candidate hasn't contributed his own money to the Trump Foundation since 2008, although he took $120,000 from the charitable foundation the year before to settle fines he owed for violating Palm Beach rules.
"He put up a flagpole twice the legal height and refused to take it down," Meyers said. "Sounds like he's compensating for something. When Freud heard that, he tried to roll over in his grave -- but he couldn't, because he had a boner."
Trump also used the charity's money to settle a dispute over a $1 million prize he refused to pay out in hole-in-one contest held at a golf course he owned.
"He rigged the contest so it couldn't be won," Meyers said. "He's like a carny working the ring toss at a state fair. There's a reason the Donald Trump Foundation is abbreviated 'DTF,' because it is down to F you over."
The real estate developer and former reality TV star also used charitable donations to buy a 6-foot-tall portrait of himself at auction -- although his wife was the only bidder.
Trump claims he's made tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations from his personal money, but there's no proof until he releases his tax returns.
"I personally don't buy that a guy who talks like this," Meyers said, playing a brief montage of Trump boasting about his brain, his words and his wealth, "that a guy who brags about himself like that would be charitable on the down-low."
"'I'd like to send a Christmas goose to the orphanage,'" Meyers added, doing a Trump impersonation. "What would you like the note to say, Mr. Trump? 'From a friend.'"
Trump using charitable donations to settle lawsuits and buy gifts for himself should be one of the bigger scandals in the 2016 campaign, Meyers said, but he thinks it's unlikely to hurt the GOP nominee.
"The reason it probably won't stick is the same reason none of Trump's scandals ever seem to stick: He has no shame," Meyers said. "In fact, when he's confronted, he just doubles down. He's like a dog who pees in the house, and when you rub his nose in it, he says, 'Mmmm, I love the smell of my own urine.'"
Republican Marco Rubio, the failed U.S. presidential contender, is battling to hold on to his U.S. Senate seat from Florida in what is shaping up to be the costliest congressional contest of 2016.
More than $33 million has been raised and over $24 million spent so far by both parties in the Florida race, according to the latest U.S. Federal Election Commission data.
That high price tag testifies, in part, to Rubio's success in building a national fundraising base as a presidential candidate, even though he was trounced in his own backyard by eventual nominee Donald Trump in the state's Republican presidential nominating contest.
It also underscores Republicans' firm belief that if they cannot hold Rubio's seat, they cannot hold the Senate.
Rubio's re-election bid, launched late in the game in June, is bolstered by the deep pockets of the Senate Leadership Fund. The group's mission is to protect the Republican Senate majority in the Nov. 8 election. It is run by confidants of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
So far, the group has devoted more money to Florida than any other state, spending $3.4 million to attack Rubio's Democratic opponent, U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.
The Republican fund is sitting on a mountain of cash - at least $40 million on hand for the closing weeks of Senate campaigns nationwide. That looks to be having an impact.
Rubio led Murphy by an average of 5.7 percentage points on Wednesday in RealClear Politics' basket of polls for Aug. 31 to Sept. 19.
With that in view, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has decided to scale back its plans for television and internet advertisements for Murphy in Florida to $6 million from $10 million between now and Nov. 8, a DSCC official said.
Even the remaining money is being held back until the final three weeks of the campaign, the official added.
Instead, Democrats are redeploying into lower-cost media markets in North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana, according to the DSCC, which works to elect more Democrats to the Senate.
MURPHY DOWN, NOT OUT
Until June 22, when Rubio decided he wanted to return to the Senate despite a low attendance record in his first term, Democrats saw Florida as low-hanging fruit. That was because Republicans had fielded a roster of candidates with limited statewide appeal and money-raising ability.
Rubio, hoping to remain a rising Republican star with an eye on a 2020 run for president, quickly cleared the field, knocking out his last Republican opponent, a wealthy political novice, and setting up his race against Murphy.
As of Aug. 10, Rubio had raised $14.2 million and spent $6.3 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, citing Federal Election Commission figures. Murphy had raised $11.2 million and spent $7.8 million.
Despite the money disadvantage, Murphy is by no means vanquished. A Sept. 16-19 poll by Monmouth University had Rubio leading by only 2 percentage points, and showed Murphy enjoying a 14-point lead in Rubio's home base of South Florida.
If the numbers improve further for Murphy, the DSCC could readjust and, like a race-track bettor, scurry to plunk down millions of new dollars in a renewed Florida push.
Last week, a Democratic political action committee and the AFSCME labor union announced a $1.8 million anti-Rubio ad campaign as part of a $10 million ad plan.
While money plays an outsized role, it is not everything in this freewheeling U.S. election season. For instance, the political fortunes of Republican presidential nominee Trump could benefit other Republicans, including Rubio. Trump has opened a 4-point lead against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Florida, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos polling.
In a Senate hallway interview, Rubio downplayed any Trump effect, even a positive one, saying: "I always feel like I need to win my own race." Rubio has endorsed Trump, but clashed sharply with him when they were presidential rivals.
U.S. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee emphasized the importance of Florida to Republicans' hopes of keeping control of the Senate.
Asked about Democrats refocusing resources from Florida to other states, Wicker said: "If they take their money out and put it someplace else, we'll combat it there," adding: "We are going to stay vigilant in the state of Florida."
(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Peter Cooney)
“Don’t feed the trolls,” the saying goes, as if it were really that easy. As a prescriptive for navigating the harassment, hatred and bile that now fester on and darken the Internet and social media, it’s both woefully inadequate and unrealistic advice. Like its closely related partner, “Don’t read the comments,” the suggestion that we all just ignore the toxic venom spewed online by actors who often travel in packs and attack in hordes, underestimates the unignorable provocation, emotional trauma and bonafide fear they purposely create and instill. The bunk idea that we can all just look away—or more annoyingly, log off, shut down or shut up—is the quaint, ineffective (and in our current troll-glutted climate, offensive) relic of a bygone era. It’s a holdover from a time when the internet was a kinder, gentler digital space and the trolls who roamed it less malicious monsters than playful pranksters.
The evolution of trolling, like that of the internet itself, has occurred with surprising and unpredictable speed. In the early days of the World Wide Web, trolling took the form of a relatively innocuous—though intrusive and annoying—type of merry pranksterism. Fusion contributor Kristen V. Brown describes 1990s Usenet forums as sites where trolling was considered “a little like a prank phone call”; one 2002 Urban Dictionary entry defines trolls as people who post “deliberately provocative message[s]...with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument,” while another states that “trolling does not mean just making rude remarks: shouting swear words at someone doesn't count as trolling...and isn't funny.”
Examples of latter-day trolling might include putting up wantonly obtuse, logically circuitous, mind-blowingly stupid, off-topic or antagonistic messages (often dubbed “flaming”), crafted solely for the purpose of frustrating or otherwise irritating more sincere members of an online community. The idea was that trolls didn’t mean the dumb things they said, though successful trolling—and this is key—required that those they aimed to piss off believe that they did. “Troll” was a label the angry members of an online community imposed on troublemakers, a way to identify and ferret out those hellbent on ruining an otherwise good conversation.
“There would be guys who would go onto the Star Trek newsgroup and say, ‘You know, I think Spock was actually human,’” says Jon Hendren, who has become one of the internet’s most revered trolls based on a series of outrageous stunts, including appearing on a TV news segment about Edward Snowden and instead discussing the plight of Edward Scissorhands. “It would garner these huge lengthy responses from guys who would list every time Spock said something about being Vulcan. You knew the guy who said that [Spock was human] was not being serious, but he also wasn't breaking any rules. He's getting his jollies from that—and I think that's what trolling is to me. It's where you play within the bounds of an established system...to highlight the absurdity within those systems, hopefully in a funny way.”
4chan and Reddit went live in 2003 and 2005 respectively, and the two sites become epicenters for trollish behavior. Whereas trolling had previously been a thing you were accused of by those who disapproved of your behavior, now “trolls” began to claim the title for themselves, considering it a source of pride.
“4chan was when people really started to take that label on as something that they wore almost as a badge of honor,” says Whitney Phillips, a media folklorist and actual scholar on internet trolls, whose doctoral thesis served as the foundation for 2015’s This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “This was a point of subcultural identification. It was a way to connect with the people who were around you who were engaging in similar behaviors. It was a way of marking an in group, essentially.”
Phillips, who has spent nearly a decade e-staking out the virtual spaces trolls frequent, such as 4chan, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, notes in her book that there is “every indication that the vast majority of subcultural trolls—certainly the ones I interacted with—are relatively privileged white males for whom English is either a first or second language.” In the mid-aughts, as the particularly white-male dominated spaces of 4chan and Reddit grew exponentially, trolls began taking up more and more digital space, not just on those sites but across the internet in general. Just as in real life (or IRL), when groupthink and mob mentality are added to the churn of toxic masculinity, sexism, racism, white supremacy and male fragility, the results were predictably ugly. Trolls had long claimed they were in it “for the lulz,” which is sort of like lolz, but at other people’s expense. In the decided shift in the tone of trolling, the incredibly unfunny invective was often directed at women, African Americans and other people of color, as well as other historically marginalized groups.
In many ways, internet forums in the U.S. offer an unvarnished look at America’s essential character; a transparent account of what this place is really about when you strip away accountability and offer anonymity in its place. On Reddit and 4chan, particularly the latter’s anything-goes /b/ board, extreme racism and vicious misogyny flourished, with cruelty and abuse becoming key traits of the hivemind personality. Administrators at 4chan and Reddit responded to the explosion of hate speech and vitriol by doing absolutely nothing, then followed that up by turning their inaction into a policy of sorts, framing it as vague, overly simplistic advocacy for free speech. That approach quickly succeeded in creating an environment less known as a site for the unimpeded exchange of ideas than a welcome haven for white nationalists, anti-Semites and women haters.
Along with the teeming masses of neo-Nazis and misogynists, this attitude attracted creeps whose interests included things like incest, rape and graphic pictures of dead children. One of the most prolific Redditors, a guy who went by Violentacrez until he was outed in 2012 as Texas military dad Michael Brutsch, created and/or moderated subreddits including r/chokeabitch, r/niggerjailbait, r/Hitler, r/jailbait and r/Jewmerica. (Not to wade too deep into the weeds here, but if you can conceive of it, or it’s so horrible you’d desperately like to forget it exists, there’s probably a 4chan board or subreddit dedicated to it.)
Dan McComas, a former higher-up Reddit until the site’s highly public reshuffling last year, reflected on the direction of trolling since the internet’s nascent days—when the worst thing you saw was “maybe sending somebody a disgusting picture and disguising it”—and what we’re seeing now. “I guess one thing leads to another, but I don't know,” said McComas, who recently founded IMZY, a social media site focused on creating online communities where abuse and harassment don’t get in the way. “I have a hard time really buying into the slippery slope thing. I think that terrible people exist, and terrible people were given platforms to thrive. Not only to thrive, but to teach people and to influence people. For those things not only to become accepted, but to become encouraged, and that it turned into something huge.”
There are harmless, beloved memes and other internet ephemera that have come from 4chan and Reddit. We have those troll bastions to thank for LOLcats and Rickrolling, and the “hacktivist” collective emerged from the masses of 4chan’s Anonymous contributors. But in the same way that Reddit (the 11th most visited site in the U.S., with 542 million monthly visitors), can take cat memes and inadvertently turn them into widely shared, culturally embedded viral touchstones, the site is also very good at reflecting and amplifying the kind of hate that’s already pervasive in American society.
As those voices have become ever louder on Reddit, they’ve often drowned out, in volume and by sheer force of will, the voices of others attempting to build communities for themselves. (A kind of “free speech for me, but not for thee,” I guess.) What’s more, many of those trolls have played up their actions as a sort of heroic pushback against “political correctness” (i.e., the idea that the people who have always been able to say whatever abhorrent things they want might now be held accountable for saying those things), which they suggest somehow violates their First Amendment rights. Never mind that the sheer amount of hateful language they freely espouse all over the internet is proof that they’re wrong.
“When people talk about free speech online, they're often referring to the very cartoon, weak version of what free speech is actually about,” Whitney Phillips told me. “The spirit of free speech is preserving the greatest amount of speech for the greatest amount of people. That's the ideal. The problem with notions of free speech that privilege the voices of the antagonist, [is that they] create an environment in which there is actually less speech....The fact of the matter is that they're not championing free speech on the whole. They're championing their own speech and their own ability to do whatever they want without having to answer to anyone. They feel threatened because it could potentially take away their ability to do whatever they wanted. In defending that, they get the spirit of the thing totally false.”
“I believe in plurality of conversation,” Phillips adds. “I believe in debate. I believe in disagreement. You can't have that if the biggest assholes have the floor. Rolling your eyes at the free speech defense online, that's not rolling your eyes at free speech. That's rolling your eyes at a very myopic, deeply privileged misunderstanding of what free speech even is or is supposed to be.”
A 2014 Daily Dot article recounts how members of the subreddit r/Blackladies were inundated with horrifying messages from racist trolls. Volunteer moderators of the group had to delete those messages one by one, even as new threats and insults flooded in, an experience that left them “exhausted and demoralized.” Likewise, one of the moderators of the subreddit r/rape, a group for survivors of sexual violence, told writer Aaron Sankin, “[W]e regularly get visitors who are sexually aroused by the stories that some of our users tell and often feel the need to inform them of that fact in the most graphic of ways possible. You could imagine how that makes a rape survivor feel, especially those with fresh trauma.” Another r/rape moderator abandoned the task after being endlessly harassed and "doxxed," meaning her personal information and identity was published online, ensuring the abuse could follow her offline, too. Stories like these have become disturbingly typical.
“Reddit, like any other site, is a culture,” Dan McComas told me. “You can kind of guess what you're going to see in every Reddit group. You click on a Reddit thread, and if it's popular you know that the first highly voted comment is going to be a joke playing on the [subreddit name], and the second highest vote is probably going to be something terribly misogynistic. Then the fifth is super racist. That's just the culture, right? I think this is the same problem you have with Twitter. It's just a culture. And once something becomes the culture, I don't think you can change it.”
That culture has long left the confines of places like Reddit and 4chan and infected the entire internet. Read any YouTube comment thread—regardless of the video subject—and you’ll encounter some random bit of misogyny or a racist slur. Anonymous eggs and alt-righties send tweets about the Jewish menace and fake stats about rampaging black criminals, which Donald Trump then retweets. Scroll down news articles written by or about women and people of color and you’re guaranteed commentary from readers with nothing to add but racism and sexist name-calling or worse, threats of violence.
In 2014, women-focused website Jezebel had to publicly call out parent company Gawker (R.I.P.) for refusing to do anything about “violent pornography” being strewn across its comment sections. Earlier this year, the Guardian conducted a study that found “eight of [its] 10 regular writers who got the most abuse from commenters online were women (four white and four non-white) and two were black men. (The 10 regular writers who got the least abuse were all men.)” Over the last couple years, the race hate and other garbage trolls have left behind have led to shutdowns of comment sections on the Daily Beast, Reuters, Mic, Verge , Re/code, NPR, The Week, National Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times and Popular Science.
A 2014 Pew Research Center study found that “73 percent of [U.S.-based] adult Internet users have seen someone be harassed in some way online and 40 percent have personally experienced it.” While that indicates the internet is pretty gross all over, women of all races and people of color in particular find themselves in the crosshairs of the worst and most relentless bad actors online. An Australian study this year suggests that online harassment against women may be on its way to becoming “an established norm in our digital society.” The Pew study concluded that while “men are more likely to experience name-calling and embarrassment...young women are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking.” That's the difference between a man online being called a jerk or an asshole, and a woman being told by an anonymous man on Twitter that he is going to “look you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head,” as journalist Amanda Hess was. Writer Joel Stein, in a recent piece on trolls for Time Magazine, noted that “nearly half of the women on staff have considered quitting journalism because of hatred they’ve faced online, although none of the men [have].”
Women of color, especially those expressing feminist or womanist ideas online, often find themselves the targets of sickeningly violent threats and harassment. Broadway actress Pia Glenn, who has a healthy Twitter following, told writer Terrell Jermaine Starr how it too often goes for black women whose very existence online trolls resent. "It takes fewer back-and-forth vollies to get to 'nigger bitch,' 'nigger cunt,'" Glenn said. "I've had lynching threats. People send me terrible historical pictures of our ancestors being lynched. So proportionately speaking, if you're not a person of color, you will not get that. Let's say there are 100 insults in the world, there are more of them that apply to us. When a white woman gets terrible harassment about being raped, attacked or killed, that's very serious as well. But there's no way she can get the lynching threats with historical pictures of black people. So there's a whole other section of ugly, hideous things people feel they can say to us."
African-American writer Jamie Nesbitt Golden changed her Twitter avatar (though not her bio) to a picture of a random white guy and found that “the number of snarky, condescending tweets dropped off considerably, and discussions on race and gender were less volatile. I had suddenly become reasonable and level-headed. My racial identity no longer clouded my ability to speak thoughtfully, and in good faith. It was like I was a new person. Once I went back to black, it was back to business as usual.”
Similarly, as part of the 2014 Twitter #RaceSwapExp experiment, white blogger Christopher Carbone replaced his avatar with a picture of black feminist writer Feminista Jones, who has said, “There’s not a day that goes by when someone isn’t trolling or harassing me.” Despite the fact that the content of Carbone's messages remained the same, he wrote that the “level of hateful tweets [he received] went from zero to off the charts,” and noted the experiment allowed him to “experience a little bit of what black women and women of color deal with 24/7/365 in all online spaces: endless trolling, racist and misogynistic hate, tactics that silence and derail, demeaning assaults on their humanity.”
Several recent troll mass attacks have helped drive home the seriousness of what we’re dealing with. In 2014, there was Gamergate, in which an onslaught of trolls began hurling threats so intense at women in gaming that some women were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding; others who publicly opposed Gamergate were targets of swatting, or prank calls that dispatched SWAT police teams to their houses. In that case, the trolls painted themselves as valiant resistors to the tyranny of feminism and SJWs, or social justice warriors. That same year, a 4chan user leaked private, naked photos of famous women including Jill Scott, Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. Alongside the outrage about privacy violations and misogyny, some unhelpfully suggested the women shouldn’t have been so bold as to take nude photos in the first place.
More recently, Leslie Jones, an African-American comedian and cast member on Saturday Night Live was deluged with racist messages by trolls outraged about this summer’s remake of Ghostbusters, which replaced the original quartet with women, including Jones. Sexist tantrums were on full display across social media from the moment the film was announced, but Jones, the lone black woman among the film’s co-stars, received the brunt of ire from trolls who imagined the movie as part of some larger conspiracy to promote #WhiteGenocide and a bunch of other nonsense they envisioned in paranoid fever dreams. Jones was so distraught by the attack—which continued to escalate until her site was hacked, its content replaced with nude photos and racist images—she abandoned Twitter for a period. In a rare move, the platform actually took action, banning the goader-in-chief of Jones’ attackers, alt-right mascot Milo Yiannopoulos.
This is where trollism—or what we now refer to as trolling—has led. On 4chan, Reddit, and other forums where hate was encouraged and allowed to grow unchecked, the alt-right has developed into a loose coalition of (mostly) angry white men who believe and propagate the idea that they are this country’s oppressed class. In this alt-landscape, Latinos and blacks are stealing their rightful spoils; feminism is upsetting the natural men-on-top order of things; Muslim invaders are destroying the country; and an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to wipe out the white race with tools that include miscegenation and homosexuality. Men who aren’t on board with the alt-right's retrograde cause are labeled “cucks,” a corruption of cuckold (or “cuckservatives” in the case of Republican opponents). (The SPLC notes “the phrase has a racist undertone...implying that establishment conservatives are like white men who allow black men to sleep with their wives.”) They describe revelatory moments—in this warped context, going all in on racism and misogyny—as swallowing the “red pill,” as in the film The Matrix.
"Essentially, you choose the red pill of truth as opposed to the blue pill of delusion," Richard B. Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute (a very neutral sounding name for a white nationalist think tank), told Vice recently. "That is, the truth about race, the truth about America, the truth about the Jewish influence, the truth about women...These are hard truths, and these are truths that go against the grain of liberal ideology and wishful thinking."
Jared Taylor, an outspoken white nationalist, has stated that while there are “areas of disagreement” among alt-right adherents, “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” If those sentiments seem a lot like the thinking espoused by Donald Trump, then you’ve stumbled onto the reasons why the movement has thrown its vast virtual weight behind the candidate. Subscribers to Reddit boards /r/WhiteRights and /r/The_Donald have increased by leaps and bounds, in some cases, rising by tens of millions month over month. It is not a coincidence this growth has happened as “the number of white nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twitter have multiplied more than 600 percent in the last four years, outperforming the so-called [ISIL] in everything from follower counts to number of daily tweets,” according to a George Washington University study.
Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign head and the executive chairman of Breitbart News, has proudly dubbed his publication “the platform for the alt-right." There’s strength in numbers, and the spread of Trumpism and alt-righties has helped make the internet a difficult place to exist for many.
In recent months, targets of online hate, including New York Times writer Jonathan Weisman (who devoted a column to the anti-Semitism alt-righters and other Trumpites have tweeted at him) and feminist writer Jessica Valenti (whose 5-year-old daughter was threatened with rape by an Instagram troll) have abandoned parts of social media. Journalist Julia Ioffe told the Guardian that she has received calls from people who’ve serenaded her with Hitler speeches, and was the subject of a neo-Nazi website post titled “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!” Bethany Mandel wrote about being subject to so much anti-Semitism—she was called a “slimy Jewess” and told she “deserve[s] the oven”—that fear prompted her to buy a gun. Cleveland.com columnist Henry J. Gomez writes that he’s seen a rise in hate mail following Trump’s ascension, with messages suggesting he should be "on the other side of the wall" and that his heritage should "disqualify" him from covering the presidential campaign. Much like the possibility of a Trump presidency, the alt-right’s “trolling” isn’t a joke, but a dangerous reality that taints online and offline lives, which are one and the same.
“The thing that's so bizarre is this demarcation, IRL, in real life, versus some otherwise place known as the internet,” Phillips told me. “The thing about real life is that it pretty much subsumes everything. It's not that the line is fuzzy. There is no line, and it makes no sense for there to be a line other than the fact that it's often used as a post hoc justification for certain people's terrible behavior. It becomes part of a sort of apology: ‘I didn't actually hurt your feelings because I said it to you online.’ What the hell does that even mean? It's just a way of perpetrators to hide behind technologies and language to justify them doing whatever it is they feel like doing that the rest of us apparently have to deal with.”
“Just because something happens in an online space doesn't mean that it isn't fundamentally connected to that person's embodied identity and experience,” Phillips added. “Of course it is. You can't go online if you don't have a body.”
When trolls patronizingly suggest their targets become thicker skinned, avert their eyes from the torrents of abuse or simply step away from the computer, they’re attempting to diminish the very real consequences their bad—in some cases and states, criminal—behavior has on real people.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Phillips told me. “That you can just choose not to react emotionally and maybe if you weren't so emotional then you wouldn't be having these problems, so stop complaining. This is ultimately about you being too emotional. Think about the preponderance of this abuse that's targeted specifically toward women and queer people and people of color. It's very easy or comparatively easy for a white dude to be like, ‘Well then, just don't take offense to racism.’ It becomes a mechanism of controlling, trying to police those sort of emotive boundaries of groups that have very real and embodied reasons for getting pissed off when they have to deal with certain kinds of content.”
In light of all this, it’s hard to make the connection between the trolling of yore and today’s online harassment and bullying. The remnants of what trolling once was—its more lighthearted past—raises the question of whether we’re doing more damage by using that word to describe behaviors that are far from playful.
“That’s the reason I don’t like the words ‘troll’ and ‘bully’” Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic who was targeted during Gamergate, told the Guardian. “It’s just a scary, violent, abusive temper tantrum.”
In a piece titled "Let’s Call 'Trolling' What It Really Is," Whitney Phillips notes the importance of language and emphasizes the danger of misnaming terrible behaviors in a way that might minimize their threat. “If an online space is overrun by violently misogynist expression,” she writes, “then I call the behavior violent misogyny, regardless of how the aggressors might describe it.”
“It's framed exclusively in terms of a kind of game,” she told me. “It's a game that the troll always wins, and if you play it, by definition then you lose. That means that if you go ahead and 'take the bait,' you essentially have brought that upon yourself. You should know better that nothing on the internet should be taken seriously. You should know better that people are behaving playfully and that when they do they are not responsible for their own actions. They are teaching you a lesson. You should be thanking them.”
By now, the word trolling itself is almost certainly lost to those who might do their absolute worst under its auspices. Perhaps the more pressing question is how to talk about trolling—meaning harassment, stalking and abuse—without serving as a recruitment tool. The alt-right relishes every scrap of media attention it receives; like Trump, the philosophy seems to be that there’s no such thing as bad press. It’s critical to call attention to the dangerous rhetoric being put out by Trump and his followers. But it’s a Catch-22, with each story—including this one—helping to draw eyes and raise the profile of a steadily growing movement.
“The alt-right wouldn't exist in the way that it does and it wouldn't have the visibility that it does now if outlets were not engaging—in most cases to explicitly condemn,” Philips said. “Very few people other than participants are like, ‘Go, alt-right.’ Most of the coverage has been explicitly negative, but it doesn't matter, they are harnessing [the media’s] labor...It's the same thing with the Leslie Jones case. I can guarantee you that part of the game was to try to get journalists to repeat and retweet that imagery. That's the end goal, is that you harness journalists in the service of your own nefarious ends and then you step back and laugh because now you've reached millions more people than you ever could have on your own.”
That problem, of elevation and amplification, is an issue not just for the media, but for any public figure who inadvertently offers exposure to a wider audience. In August, after Hillary Clinton delivered a speech attacking the alt-right, the online response from those who count themselves among the movement’s members, captured in a piece by Wired’s Issie Lapowsky, was downright celebratory. “Hillary just seeded #altright and #whitegenocide in the same speech. Everything is going according to plan....everything,” one tweet read. “I'd like to thank you @HillaryClinton, for all the promotion you are doing for us...A little goes a long way... #AltRightMeans #WhiteGenocide.”
“In a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” one anonymous white nationalist and Trump supporter told Olivia Nuzzi, writing at the Daily Beast. “Trump’s online support has been crucial to his success, I believe, and the fact is that his biggest and most devoted online supporters are white nationalists. Now, we’ve pushed the Overton window. People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re setting up for a massive cultural shift.”
He’s right. The question now is how to wrangle with the fact that every mention, no matter how negative, helps the movement gain visibility and an odd dimension of legitimacy.
“That's where the conversation really needs to be,” Phillips concludes, “and [it] raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions for people like you and people like me who engage with this content all day long, and also by engaging with it, we perpetuate it. Even if our intentions are really good, it still means that the narrative seeds continue to be cast. That's what they're banking on, and so far we have lived up to their expectations. I don't see how we could not.”
The head of the nation's largest police union took a slap at GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday for questioning the abilities of a female police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Politico is reporting.
Five days after the 330,000 member Fraternal Order of Police endorsed the Republican candidate, the head of the union expressed dismay that Trump suggested that Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby may have "choked" when she shot and killed unarmed Terence Crutcher last Friday.
Speaking at church rally in Cleveland, Trump was asked about the shooting and gave, for the usually bombastic candidate, what could be considered a thoughtful answer.
"Now, did she get scared? Was she choking? What happened? But maybe people like that, people that choke, people that do that, maybe they can't be doing what they're doing, okay? They can't be doing what they're doing,” Trump remarked.
"I watched the shooting in particular in Tulsa. And that man was hands up,” he continued. “That man went to the car, hands up, put his hand on the car. I mean, to me, it looked like he did everything you're supposed to do, and he looked like a really good man."
According to FOP executive director Jim Pasco, Trump's comments were inappropriate, stating the candidate, "Must be mindful of the due process rights and presumption of innocence accorded to all, including police officers."
Trump's comments were made in front of a group of black pastors as he continues to make a play for African-American voters who have shown nothing but disdain for him dating back to the primaries.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opposes a long-planned transition of oversight of the internet's technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders, his campaign said in a statement on Wednesday.
Congress should block the handover, scheduled to occur on Oct. 1, "or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost," Stephen Miller, national policy director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential primary foe of Trump's who has refused to endorse the real estate developer, has led a movement in Congress to block the transition, arguing it could cede control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and threaten online freedom.
Technical experts have said those claims are baseless, and that a delay will backfire by undermining U.S. credibility in future international negotiations over internet standards and security.
Publicly proposed in March 2014, the transfer of oversight of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is expected to go forward unless Congress votes to block the move.
A vote to delay the transition may come as an amendment to a temporary spending bill that Congress must pass by Sept. 30 to prevent much of the federal government from shutting down. Congressional negotiators on Wednesday were working to finalize an agreement on the spending package.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supports the Obama administration's planned transition to a global community of technologists, civil society groups and internet users, according to policy positions available on her campaign website.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Appearing at an Christian gathering in Cleveland on Wednesday, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump was put under the protection of God by a bevy of evangelicals after the host of the conference said the New York businessman needed to be protected from a "concentrated Satanic attack."
After Trump addressed a few African-American pastors and a whole lot of white people at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference, pro-Trump pastor and co-host of the event, Darrell Scott, took the mic.
Speaking to the attendees, Scott claimed that a “nationally known” -- but unidentified -- preacher had forewarned Trump “that if you choose to run for president, there’s going to be a concentrated Satanic attack against you.”
In video captured by Right Wing Watch, Scott can be seen announcing, "He said there’s going to be a demon, principalities and powers, that are going to war against you on a level that you’ve never seen before and I’m watching it every day.”
Taking the microphone, Scott's wife, Belinda, led the plea to the almighty by praying: "Now God I ask that you would touch this man, Donald J. Trump. Give him the anointing to lead this nation."
Watch the video below via Right Wing Watch:
Donald Trump often asks black voters what they "have to lose" by voting for him.
The answer, it turns out, is civil liberties.
NBC News reporter Alexandra Jaffe has gotten a look at a transcript of Trump's town hall event that's due to air tonight on Fox News, and she notices that Trump thinks one way to stop crime would be to deploy a nationwide "stop-and-frisk" program like the one New York City implemented in the 1990s.
"I would do stop-and-frisk, I think you have to," Trump will say during the event, which was pre-taped earlier on Wednesday. "We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well, and you have to be proactive."
In reality, stop-and-frisk policies have been a civil liberties nightmare, as police have been found to repeatedly use it as an excuse to harass people who have done nothing wrong.
In 2012, for instance, an audio recording revealed and NYPD officers stop-and-frisked a young black man and threatened to arrest him for "being a fucking mutt." In 2013, two officers in Philadelphia were caught on camera stopping and frisking two men whose only "crime" was saying hello to people in the neighborhood.
"You don't say 'Hi' to strangers," one of the officers said.
That same year, two NYPD officers testified in court that their supervisors implemented a strict quota system that mandated targeting black males between the ages of 14 and 21. In fact, a judge subsequently ruled the NYPD's implementation of the program unconstitutional.
At any rate, these kinds of programs have proven to be very controversial and often resented by people who get stopped by police officers despite having done nothing wrong. That Trump thinks they should be implemented on a nationwide basis will likely set off alarm bells among civil liberties activists.
I finally found a Trump supporter – this morning when I went to buy coffee. (I noticed a Trump bumper sticker on his car.)
“Hi,” I said. “Noticed your Trump bumper sticker.”
“Yup,” he said, a bit defensively.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’m curious. Why are you supporting him?”
“I know he’s a little bit much,” said the Trump supporter. “But he’s a successful businessman. And we need a successful businessman as president.”
“How do you know he’s a successful businessman?” I asked.
“Because he’s made a fortune.”
“Has he really?” I asked.
“Of course. Forbes magazine says he’s worth four and a half billion.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s been a success,” I said.
“In my book it does,” said the Trump supporter.
“You know, in 1976, when Trump was just starting his career, he said he was worth about $200 million,” I said. “Most of that was from his father.”
“That just proves my point,” said the Trump supporter. “He turned that $200 million into four and a half billion. Brilliant man.“
“But if he had just put that $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth twelve billion today,” I said.
The Trump supporter went silent.
"And he got about $850 million in tax subsidies, just in New York alone,” I said.
More silence.
“He’s not a businessman,” I said. “He’s a con man. "Hope you enjoy your coffee.”
This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Years ago, when I first started teaching and was at Syracuse University, one of my students ran for student body president on the tongue-in-cheek platform “Issues are Tissues, without a T.”
He was dismissing out of hand anything that he, or his opponents, might propose to do in office, noting that student body presidents have so little power as to make their platforms disposable.
Sadly, the news media appears to have taken a similar outlook in their coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. The stakes in the election are high. Key decisions on foreign and domestic policy will be affected by the election’s outcome, as will a host of other issues, including the appointment of the newest Supreme Court justice. Yet, journalists have paid scant attention to the candidates' platforms.
That conclusion is based on three reports on the news media’s coverage of the 2016 campaign that I have written for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I hold a faculty position.
The third report was released today and it covers the month-long period from the week before the Republican National Convention to the week after the Democratic National Convention.
The first report analyzed coverage during the whole of the year 2015 – the so-called invisible primary period that precedes the first actual contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The second report spanned the period of the primaries and caucuses.
Each report was based on a detailed content analysis of the presidential election coverage on five television networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC) and in five leading newspapers (Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today).
The analysis indicates that substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention so far in the 2016 election coverage. To be sure, “the wall” has been in and out of the news since Donald Trump vowed to build it. Other issues like ISIS and free trade have popped up here or there as well. But in the overall context of election coverage, issues have played second fiddle. They were at the forefront in the halls of the national conventions but not in the forefront of convention-period news coverage. Not a single policy proposal accounted for even 1 percent of Hillary Clinton’s convention-period coverage and, collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4 percent of it.
Trump’s policies got more attention, but not until after the Democratic convention, when he made headlines several days running for his testy exchange with the parents of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier.
That exchange sparked a “controversy,” which is sure to catch reporters’ attention. We’ve seen that time and again this election year. Past elections were not much different, featuring everything from Jimmy Carter’s “lust in my heart” Playboy interview in 1976 to Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” statement in 2012. None of these controversies was predictive of anything that happened in the presidency during the subsequent four years, but their coverage during the campaign overshadowed nearly every policy proposal put forth by the candidates.
“Medialities” is the label political scientist Michael Robinson has given to such controversies. Journalists find them irresistible, as political scientist W. Lance Bennett noted when looking at Trump’s birther claims. When Trump in 2011 questioned whether President Obama was a native-born American, his statement was seized upon by cable outlets and stayed in the headlines and on newscasts for days.
Veteran CNN correspondent Candy Crowley interviewed Trump on this issue, justifying it by saying:
“There comes a point where you can’t ignore something, not because it’s entertaining.… The question was, ‘Is he driving the conversation?’ And he was.”
In truth, the media were driving the conversation.
The leading “mediality” of the 2016 campaign has been Clinton’s emails. That and other news references to Clinton-related “scandals” accounted for 11 percent of her convention-period coverage, following the pattern of earlier stages of the campaign. What Clinton might do in the Middle East or with trade or with the challenge of income equality could reasonably be anyone’s guess, given how little attention her policy statements have received in the news.
At that, controversies rank second to the horse race as a staple of journalists’ diet. No aspect of the campaign meets journalists’ need for novelty more predictably than does the horse race. Each new poll or disruption gives journalists the opportunity to reassess the candidates’ tactics and positions in the race.
Policy issues, on the other hand, lack novelty. A new development may thrust a new issue into the campaign, but policy problems are typically longstanding. If they came and went overnight, they would not be problems. It is for this reason that when a candidate first announces a policy stand, it makes news. Later on, it normally doesn’t.
Granted, election news would be limp without attention to the horse race. The election’s bottom line – who will win in November? – is of undeniable interest. What’s open to debate is the relative importance of the horse race in the middle of the summer. During the convention period, even though questions of policy and leadership were on the agenda within the halls of the national conventions, they were not on journalists’ agenda. Polls, projections, strategy and the like constituted about a fifth of all coverage, whereas issues took up less than 1/12 and the candidates’ qualifications for the presidency accounted for less than 1/13.
As the campaign enters its final stage, one might hope that the press will provide America’s voters with information that can help them better understand the policy choices they face in November. No doubt, the presidential debates will help focus the public’s attention on the differences in the Trump and Clinton platforms. However, press coverage of past campaigns would suggest that news stories will take voters’ minds in a different direction. There’s a distinct possibility that voters will go to the polls in November with “the wall” and “emails” uppermost in their thoughts.
By Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
In a discussion of Trump supporter Don King's accidental use of the "N-word" during his speech in an Ohio church, CNN commentator Angela Rye decided that today was not the day for a white panelist to lecture her about when it's okay to use that word.
"Please tell me that you understand," she said to Trump surrogate Joseph Borelli, "that using 'negro' in 2016 is also unacceptable."
Borelli said that rappers use the "N-word" word all the time, so it must be okay for Don King to do it.
"Have you not listened to music where other African-Americans use language far worse than this?" he said.
"Please don't do that to me," Rye said. "Please don't do that to me, today."
"I am going to do it, though," Borelli said. "You can't say that Don King is saying a word that is now suddenly unacceptable. It's not one that I would use, but it's perhaps a word that Don King would use."
"What I'm saying to you," Rye said, "is this trivializes your candidate's black outreach."
Watch the video, embedded below:
A legal researcher at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law says that current lawsuits against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are sufficient grounds to impeach him from the presidency if he is elected.
Professor Christopher L. Peterson has found that should Trump win the election in November, he would be vulnerable to impeachment, thanks to fraud and racketeering lawsuits related to the Trump University case.
“In the United States, it is illegal for businesses to use false statements to convince consumers to purchase their services,” Peterson wrote in a paper published Monday titled Trump University and Presidential Impeachment. “The evidence indicates that Trump University used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of families into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham.”
“Fraud and racketeering are serious crimes that legally rise to the level of impeachable acts,” he said.
Trump University, say a number of litigants, was billed as a series of seminars with Donald Trump and top real estate professionals that would teach enrollees to wheel and deal in high-value properties and amass millions in profit.
Families were encouraged to take out extravagant loans and max out their credit cards to pay the program's $30,000 average tuition. Documents have been introduced into evidence that show that the organization targeted the families of veterans and single mothers as ideal prospects for the scam.
Peterson said that evidence in the case thus far shows that in no way was Trump University an actual educational seminar, but in fact a "sales environment" where enrollees were urged to put more and more of their own money into the program.
"Sales practices at each seminar were systematically designed, painstakingly choreographed, and implemented ruthlessly," he wrote, based on internal memos between Trump University administrators and staff. "Posing as teachers, sales staff were trained to manipulate students' emotions in order to sell expensive 'Trump elite' packages."
"Trump University trained staff to find the emotional vulnerabilities of students and exploit those vulnerabilities to sell additional Trump University packages," he said.
Many attendees were left bankrupt with their credit ruined. Then when they attempted to seek redress, their calls weren't returned and the company appeared to evaporate into thin air.
"Somehow in the cacophony of the 2016 presidential campaign, no legal academic has yet turned to the question of whether Trump’s alleged behavior would, if proven, rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the impeachment clause of the United States Constitution," said Peterson, who specializes in consumer protection and litigation of predatory scams.
Among Peterson's findings, were the following points:
·Fraud and racketeering are serious crimes. Both fraud and racketeering are considered felonies under state and federal law. First-degree fraud is punishable by up to four years in prison in Trump’s home state of New York. Racketeering is punishable by up to 20 years in prison under federal law.
·Civil cases can legally inform Congress on whether impeachment is justified. The U.S. Constitution has never required criminal conviction prior to impeachment proceedings.
·Impeachment for pre-incumbency conduct is legally permissible under the U.S. Constitution. Nothing in the Constitution’s text requires impeachable conduct to have occurred while the president is in office. The framers rejected alternative formulations of impeachable offenses that included limitations to incumbent activity.
Peterson has written multiple books on consumer protection and predatory scams, including Consumer Law: Cases and Materials and Taming the Sharks: Towards a Cure for the High Cost Credit Market.
(Correction: This story previously stated incorrectly that Christopher Peterson argued Donald Trump could be impeached before taking office. We regret the error.)
Donald Trump on Wednesday brought infamous boxing promoter and convicted murderer Don King with him to campaign in Ohio on Wednesday, and it predictably sparked a good deal of controversy.
While introducing Trump at the Cleveland-based church of Pastor Darrell Scott, King talked about why black voters should come out and support Trump's candidacy. Although King's point wasn't entirely clear, he seemed to be saying that black voters had been given bad advice about how to succeed for years, and that it was time to try something completely new with Trump.
"We need Donald Trump, especially black people, because we have to understand, brothers and sisters, they tried to tell me you have to emulate and imitate the white man and then you can be successful," he said. "I told Michael Jackson, if you are poor, you are a poor negro... if you are rich, you are a rich negro. If you are a talented intellectual, you are an intellectual negro. If you are a dancing and sliding and gliding n*gger... I mean, negro... you are a dancing and sliding and gliding negro."
Trump sat right behind King as he delivered his remarks and had a smile on his face the entire time.
During the speech, King also called Trump a "doctor of humanness" and trashed the media for trying to "ridiculize" the candidate.
Check out the full video below.
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