Today's Brief News Round-Up

The other day, Trump once again tried to tell every Jewish person who votes for President Biden that they should all be ashamed.  For a long time, whenever he’d say this, I’d respond on social media that Trump and his fascism has never been the go-to guy for what Jews should do.  But it’s taken a while for the reality to kick in and recognize that his words about this are never about votes – after all, it’s not going to change what anyone does -- but it's his anti-Semitic screed dog whistle to demonize Jews to his supporters, giving them even more permission to spread their own anti-Semitic hate.

Speaking of racist hate, last week Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) talked about his concerns about how immigrants had grown to a larger percentage of American citizens than they had been in recent years.  The first thing to know is he was not talking about undocumented immigrants, but immigrants who were in the country legally, including many (if not most) who were U.S. citizens.  And second, the percentage is almost exactly the same as it was in 1920, over 100 years ago.  But almost more to the point, never mind that almost all Americans are immigrants, children of immigrants or, like Trump, grandchildren of immigrants.) 

Fun Fact: the Founding Fathers of the United States were all "foreign born." And they actually wrote the Constitution that Chip Roy is crying out about. (Well...yes, but the United States didn't exist before. True. Also true: they were all foreign born. And created the U.S.)

And then, just days later, Chip Roy said that he had “strong concerns” about Sharia law becoming used in the U.S.

What’s long become clear is that Chip Roy’s real concerns aren't Sharia law or immigrants, but about Chip Roy and his personal insecurities towards minorities and “others.”

Finally, it was sort of shocking and disturbing to read the New York Times Editor-in-Chief go on the record to say his paper’s job was not to defend democracy but be objective in telling the truth.  For the record, one can defend democracy truthfully while being completely objective – most especially when recognizing that it is democracy that allows the New York Times and all newspapers to tell the truth.

I can imagine a future New York Times article, "At his rally, described by one observer as 'reminiscent of a putsch,' Mr. Trump announced arrests of the Times editorial board & reporters as 'enemies of the people.' There were no comments from the paper as it has been closed down."