During an appearance on CNN on Friday morning, former Defense Secretary William Cohen - who also served in the U.S. Senate as a Republican -- denounced Donald Trump in no uncertain terms, saying his use of military personnel against anti-police brutality protesters is a sign he has set the country on the path to a dictatorship.
To emphasize his point, he later called Trump the "dictator-in-chief."
Speaking with host Jim Sciutto, Cohen didn't mince words after the CNN host noted that the president and his former attorney called the protesters "terrorists."
"What does it mean for you to hear a sitting president dismissing a whole range of protesters, who in fact were largely peaceful around the White House, dismissing a whole range of them as terrorists? What does that mean to you?" the CNN host asked.
"It means that he has no understanding of what the rule of law really means in this country," Cohen began. "He has declared he wants to be the 'president of law and order,' but that's not what the declaration of this country is."
"If you go over to the Supreme Court, you see cut in stone, it is equal protection or equality under law -- equality under law," he continued. "So when he says law and order, he's missing something -- the word justice has to be there and that is what people of this country expect when they sign a contract with the U.S. government that there will be laws, there will be justice, law and order.'
"I remember a professor of mine saying liberty without order is a mess, but order without liberty is a menace," he recalled. "What I see taking place is the White House engaging in a very menacing activity and leading us down the trail toward a dictatorship where it is only the law of rule, not the rule of law."
President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Maine on Friday -- and when he does, he'll be greeted by one of the state's top newspapers calling for his resignation.
"You have never been a good president, but today your shortcomings are unleashing historic levels of suffering on the American people," the editors write. "Your slow response to the coronavirus pandemic has spun a manageable crisis into the worst public health emergency since 1918... And in the face of the worst civic unrest since 1968, with millions of Americans in the streets protesting systemic racism, you fan the flames."
The editors did give the president credit for one thing: That he didn't subject the nation to a prime time address on race relations and police brutality that would have only made matters worse.
"You correctly concluded that you have nothing to say that would make the situation better," they write. "When what’s called for is compassion, clear vision and a commitment to lead, you are out of ammo."
The editorial concludes that America needs for the "healing to begin," and says that can only start if the president "resigns now."
Merritt Corrigan, USAID’s new deputy White House liaison, has condemned the “tyrannical LGBT agenda” and celebrated Hungary’s right-wing prime minister as “the shining champion of Western civilization.”
A new Trump appointee to the United States’ foreign aid agency has a history of online posts denouncing liberal democracy and has said that the country is in the clutches of a “homo-empire” that pushes a “tyrannical LGBT agenda.”
In one post, Merritt Corrigan, who recently took up a position as deputy White House liaison at the U.S. Agency for International Development, wrote: “Liberal democracy is little more than a front for the war being waged against us by those who fundamentally despise not only our way of life, but life itself.”
Corrigan’s new position in the Trump administration, confirmed by two officials, has not been previously reported.
Corrigan previously worked for the Hungarian Embassy in the United States and tweeted that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is “the shining champion of Western civilization,” Politico reported last year. An embassy spokesman, Béla Gedeon, said Corrigan left her position there in mid-April.
Orban, a far-right politician, has cracked down on civil society, academic freedom and other liberties. USAID has recently partnered with Hungary to help Christians in Iraq, a pairing that some career USAID officials said they found unsettling.
Asked about Corrigan’s writing, acting USAID spokesperson Pooja Jhunjhunwala said the agency has a “zero-tolerance policy of any form of discrimination or harassment based on gender, race, sexual orientation, religion or any other possible distinguishing characteristic that can define any of us.”
“All employees are held to the highest of standards and are expected to treat one another with dignity and respect. Period,” she said. “This includes political appointees, civil servants, foreign service officers and contractors.”
Corrigan did not respond to emails asking about her past comments.
Politico reported last year that Corrigan wrote on her Twitter account that “our homo-empire couldn’t tolerate even one commercial enterprise not in full submission to the tyrannical LGBT agenda.” Corrigan’s Twitter account is now private.
In October, Corrigan wrote an op-ed in The Conservative Woman, a London publication, decrying “the false song of feminism” and calling for women to take up traditional roles of mother, wife and homemaker.
“A woman today is expected by society to come to marriage and motherhood in physical and spiritual decline, if ever,” she wrote. “This is the life women have been offered by those who would rather us toil away as isolated economic units for faceless corporations, far from the natural pleasures of the domestic, far from the guardianship of a loving husband, and far from the life-giving experience of motherhood.”
Corrigan’s biography on the website described her as a “conservative political strategist.” She was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee between 2016 and 2018, according to campaign finance records.
Her stated positions put her directly at odds with the stated goals of her new employer. USAID uses a “liberal democracy index” as one of its metrics in deciding whether a country is self-reliant, and it has an entire office dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment. The agency’s website says it is working for a world in which LGBT people are “respected and able to live with dignity, free from discrimination, persecution, and violence.”
Beirne Roose-Snyder, director of public policy at the Center for Health and Gender Equity, said, “An appointee who eschews gender equality, meaningful democracy and LGBTI rights cannot possibly fulfill the mission of USAID.”
Corrigan’s appointment is the latest example of the Trump administration bringing in officials to USAID whose stated views put them at odds with the agenda the agency says it promotes.
USAID’s new deputy chief of staff, Bethany Kozma, was previously an anti-transgender activist who wrote in 2016 that transgender girls are boys “claiming gender confusion.” Kozma was formerly a senior adviser for women’s empowerment at the agency.
And last week, The Washington Post reported that a Tea Party activist with a history of making and sharing anti-Islamic comments on his personal social media profiles would be the agency’s new religious freedom adviser. News of the appointment sparked criticism from Muslim groups in the U.S. and the Anti-Defamation League.
President Donald Trump told Newsmax host Sean Spicer in a Wednesday interview that "something snapped" in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin which caused him to kneel on George Floyd's neck for several minutes.
"It was a terrible thing — never should have happened. Something snapped, I think, with the policeman and the other three watching it. I guess you can't put it in the same category, but it was certainly in a very bad category," the president told his first White House press secretary turned TV host.
"Nothing good comes out of that," he added. "No, it was a very bad thing."
Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck with his hand in his pocket. Floyd, in handcuffs, repeatedly said he could not breathe and begged for help from his dead mother. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder.
The president laced into Minneapolis' Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey, a white man, for crying over Floyd's death. A nationwide outpouring of grief erupted into the most explosive bouts of civil unrest which the country has seen in decades.
"Super-liberal mayor. He was crying," Trump said. "It's not nice, but the mayor can't cry in cases like that."
"We have a very different attitude on things. I am law and order — they're not. If they're not for law and order, you're going to lose the country," he told his first press secretary, who went on to write a book in which he describes Trump as "a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow."
The president characterized the individuals protesting racial injustice as hypocrites amid the social distancing guidelines necessitated in recent months by the coronavirus pandemic.
"We want to be back to normal, but it's a little bit soon," Trump said. "But I watch these protesters — and they're the ones all claiming social distancing and everything else — it's really interesting."
"They do that — and then they're jumping on top of each other by the thousands when they're screaming, and ranting and raving, which is not a good thing," he added.
Spicer also asked Trump about the events surrounding his Monday evening photo-op at St. John's Episcopal Church, which he claimed had been "handled very well" by authorities.
"I went there because somebody suggested it was a good idea," the president claimed. "And I thought it was a great idea, and it was a great idea."
"The military moved them back. I guess they just reported there were no — what do you call them? The rubber bullets. There was none of that used. They just moved them back," Trump told Spicer.
Spicer admitted on national TV to defending the president's falsehoods to the American people for months, beginning on the first day of the administration over the crowd size at Trump's inauguration.
"They didn't know until just shortly before that I was going there. Somebody suggested — I said, 'Let's go. Let's walk.' And we walked from the White House, and I think everything was handled very well," Trump said.
"I will tell you," he added. "Religious leaders loved it."
But religious leaders such as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington condemned the assault, in which two priests were gassed.
When Spicer asked Trump if he had "grown in his faith" during his first term, the president said: "I think, maybe I have, from the standpoint that I see so much that I can do."
"I've done so much for religion," Trump added.
In a 2018 appearance on the "Today Show," Spicer reflected on Trump's controversial relationship with the truth.
"Look, he's the ultimate salesman," the Republican said. "I think he talks about it in his books how he uses hyperbole to sell issues and that's how he his — he's a salesman, and a negotiator and a businessman first and foremost."
You can watch the full Trump-Spicer interview below via YouTube:
In cities across the country, police departments have attempted to quell unrest spurred by the death of George Floyd by firing rubber bullets into crowds, even though five decades of evidence shows such weapons can disable, disfigure and even kill.
In addition to rubber bullets — which often have a metal core — police have used tear gas, flash-bang grenades, pepper spray gas and projectiles to control crowds of demonstrators demanding justice for 46-year-old George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, while other officers restrained his body. Some peaceful demonstrations have turned violent, with people smashing windows, setting buildings afire and looting stores.
The use by police of rubber bullets has provoked outrage, as graphic images have flashed on social media showing people who have lost an eye or suffered other injuries after being hit.
A study published in 2017 in BMJ Open found that 3% of people hit by rubber bullets died of the injury. Fifteen percent of the 1,984 people studied were permanently injured by the rubber bullets, also known as “kinetic impact projectiles.”
Rubber bullets should be used only to control “an extremely dangerous crowd,” said Brian Higgins, the former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey.
“Shooting them into open crowds is reckless and dangerous,” said Dr. Douglas Lazzaro, a professor and expert in eye trauma at NYU Langone Health.
In the past week, a grandmother in La Mesa, California, was hospitalized in an intensive care unit after being hit between the eyes with a rubber bullet. Actor Kendrick Sampson said he was hit by rubber bullets seven times at a Los Angeles protest.
In Washington, D.C., the National Guard allegedly fired rubber bullets Monday to disperse peaceful protesters near a historic church where President Donald Trump was subsequently photographed.
In a statement, Attorney General William Barr defended the actions of local and federal law enforcement officers in Washington, saying they had “made significant progress in restoring order to the nation’s capital.”
Barr did not mention the use of tear gas or rubber bullets.
Freelance photographer Linda Tirado said she was blinded by a rubber bullet at a protest in Minneapolis.
In an email, Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson John Elder said, “We use 40 mm less-lethal foam marking rounds. We do not use rubber bullets.”
Elder didn’t mention the brand name of the foam marking rounds used by Minneapolis police. But a website for the “Direct Impact 40 mm OC Crushable Foam Round” depicts a green, bullet-shaped product described as a “point-of-aim, point-of-impact direct-fire round.” The site says the projectiles are “an excellent solution whether you need to incapacitate a single subject or control a crowd.”
No one knows how often police use rubber bullets, or how many people are harmed every year, said Dr. Rohini Haar, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights. Many victims don’t go to the hospital.
Police are not required to document their use of rubber bullets, so there is no national data to show how often they’re used, said Higgins, now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. There are no nationally agreed-upon standards for their use.
When aimed at the legs, rubber bullets can stop a dangerous person or crowd from getting closer to a police officer, Lazzaro said.
But when fired at close range, rubber bullets can penetrate the skin, break bones, fracture the skull and explode the eyeball, he said. Rubber bullets can cause traumatic brain injuries and “serious abdominal injury, including injuries to the spleen and bowel along with major blood vessels,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician in New York City and a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Firing rubber bullets from a distance decreases both their force and their accuracy, increasing the risk of shooting people in the face or hitting bystanders, Lazzaro said.
Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York, has called for rubber bullets to be banned.
The British military developed rubber bullets 50 years ago to control nationalist rioters in Northern Ireland, although the United Kingdom stopped using them decades ago. Rubber bullets are used by Israeli security forces against Palestinian demonstrators. French police were criticized for using rubber bullets last year after dozens of “yellow jacket” demonstrators were blinded and hundreds were injured.
“Rubber bullets are used almost every day somewhere in the world,” Haar said. “Using them against unarmed civilians is a huge violation of human rights.”
Acoustic weapons, such as sound cannons that make painfully loud noises, can damage hearing.
Tear gas can make it difficult to see and breathe.
Pepper spray, while painful and irritating, doesn’t cause permanent damage, Lazzaro said.
Pepper spray balls, which have been used to quell recent protests, can be deadly when used incorrectly. In 2004, a 21-year-old Boston woman was hit in the eye and killed by a pepper spray pellet fired by police to disperse crowds celebrating the city’s World Series win.
Disorientation devices that create loud noises and bright lights, known as concussion grenade or flash-bangs, can cause severe burns and blast injuries, including damage to the ear drum. Panicked crowds can cause crush injuries.
Water cannons can cause internal injuries, falls and even frostbite during cold weather.
Physical force, such as hitting someone to subdue them, causes about 1 in 3 people to be hospitalized, said Dr. Howie Mell, a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians and former tactical physician, who worked with SWAT teams.
Rubber bullets are less harmful than subduing people by “physical force or regular bullets, Mell said. “But we’re firing a lot more of them this week than we usually do.”
Appearing on CNN's "New Day" on Friday morning, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia set a white state lawmaker straight over her comments that the imminent removal of a statue commemorating Confederate General Robert E. Lee was erasing her history.
Speaking with host John Berman, Mayor Levar Stoney expressed pleasure at the upcoming removal of the massive statue, saying it was a long overdue -- before the interview turned to comments made by State Senator Amanda Chase (R) made in a Facebook post.
Noting that the white lawmaker complained, "Let's be honest here, there is an overt effort here to erase all-white history," Stoney had a few words for the lawmaker.
"You don't know how many times, since I've been a young man who grew up in Virginia, I have heard people tell me, 'you know that's our history, that's your history as well,'" he began. "And I always have to remind -- you know that that history means to me? I understand what it means to you, I want you to take a step back and what that means to me."
"That history of the Confederacy was to ensure that people like me never hold the office of mayor," he explained. "Young black kids never get educated, that we will just be cattle and property for the remainders of our lives. That's what the confederacy was all about."
"And even Robert E. Lee himself said that there should not be statues of him and others erected after the end of the Civil War," he lectured. "And so this is a reckoning that has been a long time coming."
Two white Kentucky men were arrested after one of them pepper-sprayed police officers and demonstrators and the other pointed a gun at protesters.
More than 50 demonstrators marched Tuesday evening from a statue honoring Robert E. Lee outside the Calloway County Courthouse with a police escort through the streets of Murray, holding signs protesting the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, reported WKYU-FM.
Less than an hour into the march, officers arrested 55-year-old John Dickerson, of Paducah, on wanton endangerment charges after he pointed a gun at protesters.
Then a second man, 53-year-old David Fryemire, also of Paducah, blasted protesters and five officers at close range with some type of chemical irritant from his car, and then tried to drive into the crowd before he was stopped by police.
“When we started coming up on his car, he had a gun pushed up against his chest,” one woman told the campus radio station. “We all went back and gathered around his car, and then he pulled out pepper spray.”
Protesters reported feeling nauseated and extreme burning sensations, leading some of them to suspect the chemical was bear spray -- which measures at about 2 million Scoville units.
The woman said she, her girlfriend and her dog were directly sprayed, and she said the dog rolled on the ground and cried for hours.
“My eyes swelled shut. We couldn’t see to get out of the road,” she said. “It felt like our skin was on fire for hours.”
The demonstration ended back at the Confederate memorial, which Murray State assistant football coach Sherman Neal II called to remove in an open letter published the day before.
Fryemire faces two counts of first-degree wanton endangerment, three counts of fourth-degree assault and five counts of third-degree assault.
Dickerson was charged with first-degree wanton endangerment.
Appearing on CNN's New Day with host John Berman, retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute explained that Donald Trump finally went a bridge too far this week with retired military officials when his administration deployed military police to turn on peaceful protesters in a Washington D.C. park.
Speaking with the host, Lute -- who also served as U.S. ambassador to NATO -- said tension between the president and military officials has gradually increased over the past three and a half years, but that the past week's incidents led to a "tipping point."
After host Berman read off a list of high profile ex-military officials who have either criticized Trump or defended their former colleagues from attacks from the president, Lute was asked what had changed.
"I think the attention is clearly on the protests centered in and around the White House and, in particular, the president's walk across Lafayette Park, essentially with his national security team in tow," he explained. "That rightly gained a lot of attention this week and I think the basic point is that there's been a steady incremental change over the last 3 1/2 years as to how the president relates to the military. It has only burst on to the public scene most prominently this week. This has been a process underway for at least 3 1/2 years under President Trump."
"You have the president talking to the governors and recommending they crackdown violently and strongly against these largely peaceful protests, which the president refers to as being sponsored by terrorists when in fact they're sponsored by concerned and outraged American citizens," he continued. "You have the secretary of defense using inappropriate terms that the U.S. military could be used to dominate the 'battle space.' Well, that's -- those terms don't apply to the U.S. military and the American citizens."
"All of this led to the walk across Lafayette Park which had been violently cleared of peaceful protesters so the president could have a photo-op," he added. "So the combination of these vignettes makes this decidedly different and in my view crosses the line in terms of appropriate presidential leadership clearly, but also appropriate relationship between the president and the military."
Gov. Greg Abbott called on two Republican county chairs to resign after they shared a racist conspiracy theory about George Floyd's death.
Republican leaders in four Texas counties shared racist Facebook posts, some of which also floated conspiracy theories, leading Gov. Greg Abbott to call for two of them to resign.
Abbottand other top Texas Republicans called for the resignation of the GOP chairs in Bexar and Nueces counties after they shared on social media a conspiracy theory that Floyd's death was a "staged event," apparently to gin up opposition to President Donald Trump. There is no evidence to support that claim; Floyd, a black Minnesota man, died last week after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
"These comments are disgusting and have no place in the Republican Party or in public discourse," Abbott spokesman John Wittman said in a statement Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the GOP chairman-elect in Harris County, Keith Nielsen, posted an image on Facebook earlier this week that showed a Martin Luther King Jr. quote — "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" — on a background with a banana. The juxtaposition of the quote and the banana can be read as an allusion to equating black people with monkeys, a well-worn racist trope. Nielsen appears to have deleted the post and apparently addressed it on his Facebook page Thursday evening.
"It is unfortunate that the sentiment of the quote and my admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been overshadowed by people's misinterpretation of an image," Nielsen wrote, calling for "racial reconciliation" in America. "My hope is I will continue to be part of the solution and never part of the problem."
The Texas Tribune became aware of Nielsen's post after Abbott called for the resignation of the Bexar County and Nueces County chairs. Wittman could not immediately be reached for comment about the third post.
U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Houston Republican, said in a statement to the Tribune that "Nielsen has no place in our party. Not now. Not ever" — and called his post "a sad reminder that such blatant ignorance and bigotry still exists."
Even later Thursday, Democrats also criticized a fourth post from a GOP chair on Facebook. Sue Piner, chair of the Comal County GOP, shared a post on Sunday that included an image of liberal billionaire George Soros and text that said, "I pay white cops to murder black people. And then I pay black people to riot because race wars keep the sheep in line."
Piner could not be immediately reached for comment about the post. The unfounded Soros conspiracy theory is among many that have spread online as Americans have protested policy brutality.
Republican Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush late Thursday said all four county leaders should step down.
"I have said it before and I will say it again now: the GOP must not tolerate racism. Of any kind. At any time," he said in a Tweet.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, GOP Chairwoman CynthiaBrehm did not respond to request for comment for this story but told Spectrum News that she would not resign over her post. She told the TV station that she did not agree with the post and rebuffed the cast of GOP leaders calling for her to step down, saying they "do a lot of things, too, that I don’t agree with, but I don’t ask for their resignation."
In the post on Facebook, Brehm described the situation in which Floyd died as the "possibility" that "this was a filmed public execution" for the "purpose of creating racial tensions." She also cited the "rising approval rating of President Trump in the black community" as a reason for why "an event like this was unfortunately predictable."
Brehm was not the only big-city county GOP chair to spread the conspiracy theory. After she received wide condemnation Thursday, it surfaced that the chairman in Nueces County — home to Corpus Christi — had posted the same text on Facebook last week. The post from the chairman, Jim Kaelin, called it an "interesting perspective."
Wittman told The Texas Tribune that the governor also wanted to Kaelin to step aside.
"Spreading conspiracy theories that the murder was staged simply defies reality; it is irresponsible, and unbecoming of anyone who holds a position in the GOP," Wittman said in a statement.
Abbott's call for Brehm to resign earlier Thursday prompted a swift succession of condemnation. Shortly after Wittman's statement, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's campaign said he believes Brehm should resign as well. Similar resignation calls came Thursday afternoon from Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen. Dickey said in a statement that he had "personally reached out" to Brehm to ask her to step down.
Brehm has been a lightning rod since she took over the party in Bexar County in 2018. She made headlines last month for declaring the new coronavirus a hoax pushed by Democrats.
At least one San Antonio Republican, former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, acknowledged that Brehm has a "long history of making racist and inflammatory statements, peddling conspiracy theories, and bringing embarrassment upon Bexar County Republicans." He said in a statement it was "well past time for her to resign."
Brehm's Facebook post about Floyd began receiving wide attention Wednesday after Gilbert Garcia, columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, posted a screenshot of it on Twitter. He later said he had taken the screenshot from her Facebook page Wednesday morning, and it was apparently deleted that afternoon.
Garcia's tweet prompted U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, whose district includes Bexar County, to call for Brehm to step down immediately. The other Republican who represents Bexar County in the U.S. House, Rep. Will Hurd of Helotes, said he agreed Brehm should resign after Abbott's call Thursday.
The Texas Democratic Party said Wednesday evening that Abbott and other Texas Republicans should ask for Brehm's resignation.
"Cynthia Brehm’s comments are flat out wrong and dangerous," party spokesman Abhi Rahman said in a statement. "Enough is enough."
Democrats also called on Republicans to denounce Brehm’s comments last month about the coronavirus crisis, which she said "has been promulgated by the Democrats to undo all of the good that President Trump has done for our country." The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had specifically called on Roy and two other San Antonio-area GOP candidates to condemn those remarks.
Roy's chief of staff, Joseph Wade Miller, said Wednesday evening he was unaware of Brehm's coronavirus comments and the Democratic calls to denounce them. "Just another reason why she should resign though," he tweeted.
"Coronavirus clearly isn't a hoax," Miller told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. "It's a very serious public health problem."
Cassandra Pollock contributed to this report.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story misspelled Nueces County.
With the country’s long history of racist killings, it may be confusing to think that racists and white supremacists are among those objecting to the killing of people of color.
But people affiliated with far-right groups aren’t trying to be part of the overall protest movement. Having researched these groups, we think it’s likely that they are attempting to hijack the event for their own purposes.
As researchers of street gangs and far-right groups, we see that in this case, they want to stoke a civil war between the races – one they think they can win. By antagonizing police, destroying property, or intimidating the public by adopting military gear – including weapons – these groups are attempting to instigate violence between the police, protesters and the public. Rousting law enforcement to violently retaliate against black people en masse is the first step.
Instigating civil war
The far-right is not unified by a strict ideology. It is a broad movement with various factions vying for greater amounts of attention and influence.
“Accelerationism” – the idea that inducing chaos, provoking law enforcement, and promoting political tension will hasten the collapse of Western government – has taken root among far-right groups. One such group, the “Boogaloo Bois,” identified by their penchant for wearing Hawaiian shirts, has been observed at protests in Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Oregon. As with any far-right movement, “Boogaloo Bois” groups are rather unstructured and have varied beliefs, lacking any hierarchical organization.
In Las Vegas, three “Boogaloo Bois” were arrested with firearms and a plan to incite violence during George Floyd protests. Social media posts and online chat groups have also shown them attempting to infiltrate other protests across the country.
Other far-right extremists are talking on social media about the protests requiring a lot of police attention and see an opportunity to engage in targeted terror attacks. Their overall intention is the same: fanning flames to burn down the federal government, making room for them to establish a whites-only country.
This push to give money to support everything from food banks to vaccine research comes a decade after the Giving Pledge, a voluntary effort to give away at least half of an immense fortune during the signatory’s lifetime, first launched.
When signatories join the Giving Pledge, they can voluntarily submit a letter explaining their commitment to philanthropy that’s posted on the internet. Together with my colleagues and fellow philanthropy scholars Elena McCollim and George E. Mitchell, I analyzed these letters to better understand how billionaires make sense of their generosity.
10 years old
Following the Great Recession, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates teamed up with investor Warren Buffett and a few of their wealthy friends to hatch this plan to increase giving among billionaires.
Five of the 10 richest men in the United States have joined the Giving Pledge. Besides Gates and Buffett, that includes Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and the entrepreneur and politician Michael Bloomberg. Taken together, the current combined wealth of those five fortunes adds up to about $385 billion. The total wealth of everyone who signed the pledge in its first decade was at least an estimated $1.14 trillion as of the end of 2019, according to Forbes Magazine.
Insight into how the wealthy explain their giving
The letters are typically fairly short and addressed to Buffett or Gates. Many describe why the donors engage in philanthropy and identify a few favorite causes. We found that 187 of the 209 signatories have submitted them.
You cannot assume that the letters contain the true motives for making this pledge, but these missives do open a window into why these billionaires believe they should give away so much of their wealth. None referred to a desire to become more famous, for example, or openly acknowledged any sense of guilt. Yet those feelings might contribute to the personal motivation these rich people have to join the Giving Pledge.
In reviewing the letters, we found 10 distinct explanations for giving. The top five appeared in at least 20% of the letters, while the remaining five were in 10% or fewer.
A desire to be seen as grateful and altruistic dominated many of these accounts, with more than a third describing a drive to make a difference.
“Helping disadvantaged groups live decent lives in the process of creating wealth has been my personal credo,” wrote Dong Fangjun, a Chinese investor who now funds efforts to clean up China’s polluted countryside.
The second most common reason was a desire to give back.
“I have so much gratitude for being a woman in America,” wrote Sara Blakely, the founder of the Spanx undergarment company and a supporter of several women’s causes. “I never lose sight that I was born in the right country, at the right time.”
The letters also highlighted the joy of giving.
“I get tremendous pleasure from helping others,” wrote Bill Ackman, an investor and hedge fund manager who funds a wide range of arts, social justice and other kinds of nonprofits. “It’s what makes my life worth living.”
The life lessons taught by parents were another common reason these major donors say they became interested in giving.
“From as far back as I can remember, my parents taught me the importance of giving back, whether we had a little or a lot,” wrote Jim Pattison, a Canadian businessman who supports a wide range of nonprofits, including hospitals.
‘Noblesse oblige’ and other less common motives
Many of the letters conveyed a sense of “noblesse oblige,” a French term for the idea that being wealthy creates a duty to give.
“I strongly believe that those of us, who are privileged to have wealth, should contribute significantly to try and create a better world for the millions who are far less privileged,” wrote Azim Premji, a tech industry leader who has become India’s biggest philanthropist.
Among the five least common explanations our team identified were references to principles of justice, concerns about the downside of immense inheritances, having no other use for vast wealth, religious beliefs and a sense that luck played a big role in becoming rich.
Some of the younger donors described themselves as being only stewards of their wealth. In this view, principles of justice and equality demand that the wealthy share generously.
For example, Jeff Lawson, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and his wife Erica Lawson included a quote by Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
About a tenth of the letters cited concerns over the possible harm a large inheritance could do to their own kids and grandchildren.
“We all know second- and third-generation wealth where the recipients were actually born on third base but think and act like they hit a triple,” wrote John W. “Jay” Jordan II, an American investor with three children and two stepchildren and one of the biggest donors ever to the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater.
Some pledgers said they see nothing better to do with their excessive wealth. The late real estate investors Herb and Marion Sandler, whose fortune launched the investigative news outlet Pro Publica, put it this way: “How many residences, automobiles, airplanes and other luxury items can one acquire and use?”
Religion and spirituality play a surprisingly minor role, with some exceptions.
“We were both raised in the Church, and a key theme of the Bible is the importance, the necessity, of giving,” explained Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge fund manager, and his wife Sonia Jones. The couple has made education and inequality high priorities in their giving.
Finally, a few of these big donors attributed their eagerness to give away much of their money to being aware of their good fortune. “To be repeatedly in the right place at the right time, that is the mother of all luck,” wrote Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecommunications entrepreneur who invests in improving African leadership and governance.
Out to change the world
But what sets these donors truly apart from the rest of us is what we philanthropy scholars call “hyperagency” – the desire to singlehandedly change the world in accordance with their ideas and dreams.
For example, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the surgeon and entrepreneur who owns the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Lakers, and his wife Michele B. Chan, made an ambitious statement in their letter: “Our passion, our mission is to transform health and health care, in America and beyond.”
In other words, Giving Pledge letters harbor contradictions with their messages about both ambition and humility. Many of the wealthy people who embraced this campaign have seen themselves as uniquely capable of changing the world. At the same time, they would like others to see them as modest, grateful and selfless.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon, businessman, media mogul and bioscientist, chairs three big nonprofits.
A former top Trump administration official on Friday broke with his former boss and said that police departments across the United States have problems with systemic racism.
However, he says that doing so will require taking a hard look at the issue of racism within law enforcement.
"There is a path for them to galvanize healing while representing and supporting the vast majority of honorable men and women of all races under their command," he writes. "The demonstrations have also sparked one question that has resonated across the media spectrum: is there systemic racism in American policing? The answers have varied, but the truth is that of course there is."
He then encourages police chiefs across the country to "identify with the purpose and message of the peaceful protesters" and "embrace the pain of disenfranchised communities and recognize the role that some in their organizations have in causing it."
McAleenan's words stand in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump, who has refused to acknowledge that racism plays a role in creating disparities in the American criminal justice system.
President Donald Trump is losing support from his evangelical base as he lurches from one crisis into another.
Numerous polls show that religious Americans, like most other Americans, disapprove of the president's performance, and that could imperil his re-election chances, reported the New York Times.
Nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals -- a group that's already shrinking as a share of the electorate -- approved of Trump's performance in March, but his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has bled 15 points from their support, according to a new poll from Public Religion Research Institute.
“He had an opportunity in March when people were looking to him," said Robert Jones, the institute's chief executive, "and then within four weeks he squandered it."
Those losses could be offset by efforts from activist group's such as Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition, which plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to identify and register new religious conservative voters and rallying right-wing Christians.
And another PRRI poll from last year found that 31 percent of white evangelical voters said there was almost nothing Trump could do to lose their support.
