70,000 Children Separated: Pure Evil

Causing 'Profound' Trauma, Trump Administration Detained Record-Breaking 70,000 Children in 2019

The U.S. held a record 69,550 migrant children in detention facilities in 2019, a Tuesday report from The Associated Press and PBS Frontline found, leading to major psychological and physiscal harm and lasting trauma. 

"No other country held as many immigrant children in detention over the past year as the United States—69,550," said AP tech reporter Frank Bajak in a tweet promoting his colleagues' work. "The physical and emotional scars are profound." 

The story lays out in excrutiating detail the emotional pain of victims of President Donald Trump's child separation policy, focusing on, among others, a Honduran father whose three-year-old daughter can no longer look at him or connect with him after being separated at the U.S. border and abused in foster care.

Trump's Senior Advisor Stephen Miller Is a White Nationalist

Anybody who caught his warm-up act on the campaign trail in 2016 tumbled in less than two minutes to the fact that Stephen Miller was a creature of the primordial political ooze. He was a nasty bit of business, unleavened even by the slightest bit of wit or humor. He looked on the campaign crowds as though they’d come to watch him torture puppies to death with a flamethrower. Not only was this a guy you didn’t want close to any source of political power, this was a guy you didn’t want close to power tools. On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s newsletter, Hatewatch, published a collection of e-correspondence from Miller that fairly well frames him as an outright white nationalist with more than a little of that Nuremberg torchlight illuminating his thinking. My god, how low have we slipped that this guy commands any part of a democratic self-government?

In the Trump administration, where staffers come and go quickly, White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller has managed to stick around since the campaign days when he worked as a speechwriter. Miller, who previously worked as a communications director for then Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, became Trump's point person on immigration, particularly after the departure of Kirjsten Nielsen as secretary of Homeland Security. And insiders have credited him with some of the administration's most extreme anti-immigration policies: family separation policy; attempts to undo protections for immigrants in the U.S. legally; and a proposal to permanently block green card access for any immigrant who relied on social services. Miller has long drawn accusations of white supremacist leanings both within and outside the Trump administration. After poignant images circulated of migrant family separations at the border, one outside White House advisor told Gabriel Sherman at *Vanity Fair: “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.” Now there is public record of Miller promoting explicit and virulent white nationalist propaganda. On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks and monitors U.S. hate groups and extremists, released a series of e-mails between Miller and Katie McHugh, a former editor at the far-right website Breitbart. McHugh—who renounced the far right since being fired from Breitbart—told the SPLC that other editors at the site introduced her to Miller to use for direction when covering immigration. Spanning 2014 to 2017, the messages include many examples of Miller referencing white supremacist websites, writers, and books, as well as railing against U.S. immigration policies he would later work to undo in the Trump White House.

Trump Is a Psycho, Part 651,234,001

Yesterday, President Donald Trump spoke in front of a gaggle of reporters and made a series of unhinged and outright false claims about his political opponents, the still-anonymous whistleblower, and the news media. 

"Highlights":

 1.) Trump says that the whistleblower should be exposed and the whistleblower’s lawyer “sued for treason.” The president continued calling for the public release of the whistleblower’s name, which would be against the law, before serving up a particularly weird attack on Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the whistleblower. According to PBS News’ Yamiche Alcindor, the president said Zaid should be sued “maybe for treason.”

 2.) Trump says he might endorse Jeff Sessions after all because the former attorney general said “very nice things” about him in his campaign launch video. Even though the president still reportedly loathes Sessions for not doing enough to block special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, he said on Friday that he might be open to endorsing him in the Alabama Senate race next year. “I saw he said very nice things about me last night,” Trump said of Sessions. “But we’ll have to see.”

 3.) Trump says he doesn’t know the man whom he appointed to be America’s ambassador to the European Union. American EU ambassador Gordon Sondland testified this week that he told Ukrainian officials that military aid to their country would not be released unless they agreed to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden. When asked about this by a reporter, Trump began by saying, “I hardly know the gentleman.” Other witnesses have testified that Sondland was regularly in contact with Trump this year, however, and Trump called Sondland “a really good man and great American” just one month ago.

4.) Trump melted down and kept yelling, “Quiet!” at a reporter. While the president was trying to accuse former Vice President Joe Biden of corruption, a reporter interrupted him with a question, which made Trump visibly angry.  “Be quiet,” Trump said. “Be quiet! Quiet! Quiet!”

 5.) Trump stuns reporters by saying he might attend Russia’s May Day military parade. Trump revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited him to attend next year’s May Day Parade in Moscow. “President Putin invited me to the — it’s a very big deal!” he said. “Celebrating the end of the war, etc., etc. A very big deal. So I appreciate the invitation… I would love to go if I could.”