# Unite the Right Racist Scum **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 12, 2017, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471 "2017-08-12T22:19:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 20
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/381 "2017-08-14T02:19:00Z")
> [@Fuji](#): > > If I may paraphrase our dear friend **doorhinge** : Hahahahaha. > > Yeah, the USA is really the place to keep my [life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States) or [property](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U.S._Currency) secure. Good one. Thanks for the laugh! 🙂 You are happy where you are. That’s good. Now, I do agree civil forfeiture is bullshit. Pardon my language. ---
**Author:** ![Fuji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a9a28c/32.png) [@Fuji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuji)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/382 "2017-08-14T02:22:40Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > I don’t need the police’s permission to go to Wal-Mart and buy a rifle, a pistol, and a Diet Coke! Bully for you. On the other hand, when I go to Tesco’s for that Diet Coke (I’ll grant you I can’t easily pick up the other two items here), I won’t have the police following me home. Or stopping me arbitrarily. Or seizing my car. Or, ya know, _shooting me dead_. ---
**Author:** ![Fuji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a9a28c/32.png) [@Fuji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuji)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/383 "2017-08-14T02:24:29Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > You are happy where you are. That’s good. > > Now, I do agree civil forfeiture is bullshit. Pardon my language. So anyway, after you’ve changed the subject a few times, can you see that the American absolutist approach to free speech might possibly not be the best way to keep a society both free and stable? ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/384 "2017-08-14T02:27:24Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > I don’t need the police’s permission to go to Wal-Mart and buy a rifle, a pistol, and a Diet Coke! This is a little disingenuous. I think you know what Fuji was asking: why is the unfettered ability of any citizen (not just you) to easily purchase firearms a good in and of itself? What is Europe and most of the rest of the first world missing that America has? ---
**Author:** ![Fuji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a9a28c/32.png) [@Fuji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuji)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/385 "2017-08-14T02:30:11Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > This is a little disingenuous. I think you know what Fuji was asking: why is the unfettered ability of any citizen (not just you) to easily purchase firearms a good in and of itself? What is Europe and most of the rest of the first world missing that America has? Thanks. And, mind you, it’s not _that_ hard to get a legal rifle or shotgun here. Basically, if you live out in the sticks, you can just say you’re a farmer and you need to take out those foxes messing with your flock. This, I know. My best friend has both a legal shotgun and rifle and he’s never farmed a day in his life… ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/386 "2017-08-14T02:44:18Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Does it specifically protect love speech? Indifferent speech? Confused speech? Happy speech? No? > > The constitution doesn’t grant the government power to restrict speech and secondly there are two amendments reinforcing that concept. SCOTUS did though. As Dropo pointed out in post #248, in 1942, the SCOTUS voted 9-0 restricting ‘fighting words’ that “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/387 "2017-08-14T02:47:09Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Pretty much everything Trump has ever said or done proves that he is just such a thing. As is anybody who supports him in such cowardly actions. Or inactions, if you will. Bullshit. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/388 "2017-08-14T02:52:43Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Pretty much everything Trump has ever said or done proves that he is just such a thing. As is anybody who supports him in such cowardly actions. Or inactions, if you will. > **[Decades-Old Housing Discrimination Case Plagues Donald Trump](https://www.npr.org/2016/09/29/495955920/donald-trump-plagued-by-decades-old-housing-discrimination-case)** > > In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Donald Trump, his father and Trump Management, alleging the Trumps engaged in racial discrimination at their properties. > [@](#): > > The Justice Department sued Donald Trump, his father, Fred, and Trump Management in order to obtain a settlement in which Trump and his father would promise not to discriminate. The case eventually was settled two years later after Trump tried to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million for making false statements. Those allegations were dismissed by the court. > “Donald started his career, back in 1973, being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination — because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy,” … The lawsuit was based on evidence gathered by testers for the New York City Human Rights Division, which alleged that black people who went to Trump buildings were told there were no apartments available, while white people were offered units. > > Back then, Sheila Morse worked as one of those testers. When a black New Yorker was turned down for service and racial bias was suspected, Morse, who is white, would be dispatched to see if she received different treatment. > > In this case, a black man in search of an apartment in Brooklyn in 1972 saw a sign on a building: “apartment for rent.” > > "He met with the superintendent, and the superintendent said, ‘I’m very sorry, but the apartment is rented — it’s gone,’ " Morse says. "So the gentlemen said to him, ‘Well, why is the sign out? I still see a sign that says apartment for rent.’ And the superintendent said, ‘Oh, I guess I forgot to take it down.’ " > When Morse went to the building to ask about the same apartment, she says, “They greeted me with open arms and showed me every aspect of the apartment.” That was the first time Trump was sued for housing discrimination. The second time, in 1982: In April 1982, the Open Housing Center, a fair housing advocacy outfit, filed class action lawsuits against several landlords and real estate brokers on behalf of nine African Americans who had been denied apartments in Queens. (The Open Housing Center had years earlier provided the Justice Department with information used in the 1973 housing discrimination case against Fred and Donald Trump.) The defendants in these suits included Fred Trump and Coronet Hall Inc., a Trump company that owned an apartment building in Queens. Donald Trump was not named in the lawsuits, but at that point, he was an owner of Coronet Hall and a senior officer of Trump Management Inc., which controlled various Trump companies, including Coronet Hall. > **[Donald Trump’s doubling down on the Central Park Five reflects a bigger problem](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/08/donald-trumps-doubling-down-on-the-central-park-five-reflects-a-bigger-problem/?utm_term=.d96f63b515fb)** > > In the words of two of the wrongfully convicted men, here is why that is more than a personal insult. It's an abject example of where Trump could take the country. > [@](#): > > Donald Trump’s doubling down on the Central Park Five reflects a bigger problem > > Richardson, one of the five black and Latino teens convicted of a rape in Central Park — they were later exonerated — and sentenced to substantial prison time. Trump became a part of this widely reported and closely followed crime story when, two weeks after the teens were arrested, he spent a reported $85,000 placing full-page ads in all four major New York daily newspapers. > > “Just like those ads, that speech was a call for extreme action based on a whole set of completely false claims. It seems,” Richardson said, “that this man is for some strange reason obsessed with sex and rape and black and Latino men.” > …Trump’s 1989 ads never mentioned the teens by name, but they made reference to the rape in Central Park, the need to infringe on the civil liberties of some to protect the law-abiding many, to demonstrate the strength and commitment to reclaim the city from out-of-control groups of criminals and demanded the restoration of the death penalty in New York state. > > The ads were some of Trump’s first forays into public matters not connected to development or real estate. They seemed to justify and feed a lynch-mob mentality around the case, several elected officials and some of the Central Park Five told me. And, they are, in many ways, early proof that Trump’s demonstrated habits of scapegoating and group-based suspicion, his insistence that either can be a solid basis for public policy, have been nurtured for some time. > > This week, when confronted again with just how wrong he was about the Central Park Five, Trump not only refused to acknowledge widely reported and well-known facts or the court’s official actions in the case. He did not simply refuse to apologize: He described the men as guilty, and then demonstrated, once again, that he is a master at the dark art of using long-standing racial fears, stereotypes and anxieties to advance his personal and political goals. Nothing ever changes. He was a racist and a scumbag then, he is a racist and a scumbag now. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/389 "2017-08-14T03:09:11Z")
New York Times: > [@](#): > > Let’s discard the fiction that President Trump wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly to the neo-Nazi violence that killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterdemonstrator in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. The neo-Nazis heard his message loud and clear. … > > Mr. Trump is alone in modern presidential history in his willingness to summon demons of bigotry and intolerance in service to himself. He began his political career on a lie about President Barack Obama’s citizenship and has failed to firmly condemn the words and deeds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan leaders and other bigots who rallied behind him. A number of these people, including David Duke, the former Klan imperial wizard, and Richard Spencer, self-styled theorist of the alt-right, were part of the amen chorus of bigots in Charlottesville. > … > > Meanwhile a handful of congressional Republicans have condemned the hate on display in Charlottesville, and in our politics. Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado said of white supremacists, “We don’t want them in our base, they shouldn’t be in a base, we shouldn’t call them part of a base.” > > But Mr. Trump does, and in his desperation to rescue his failing presidency, he again clung to them. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/390 "2017-08-14T03:12:19Z")
Lost in the criticism of Trump’s “all sides” remark from all parts of the political spectrum yesterday is the far more damning context of his actions. In May of this year, it was reported that the Trump administration had frozen $10 million in grants to community-based counter-extremism programs designed to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, especially lone-wolf attacks, by far-right and Islamist extremists. (Life After Hate, one of the programs described in the article, ultimately had their grant pulled). If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump tried to eliminate the far-right counter-extremism program of the DHS entirely earlier in the year by replacing the Countering Violent Extremism division with a “Countering Islamist Extremism” program targeting only Muslims. This program includes both community programs and social media messaging to discourage radicalization. But wait, it gets worse. The Trump administration wants to cut a further half-billion dollars from counter-terrorism programs in their budget proposal. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/391 "2017-08-14T03:12:42Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > This is a little disingenuous. I think you know what Fuji was asking: why is the unfettered ability of any citizen (not just you) to easily purchase firearms a good in and of itself? What is Europe and most of the rest of the first world missing that America has? Good luck with this. I’m pro 2nd amendment and I couldn’t even explain to you _why_ other than some vague shit about preventing tyranny. My mother once threatened me with the household shot gun, and I certainly would never allow one in my house, but I have no problem with nonviolent citizens owning them. You get a place like Michigan where I grew up and it seems like every household has them because everybody hunts. I was taught to safely fire one when I was thirteen years old. Gun ownership is so endemic to American culture and so thoroughly an American entitlement that you’re not going to get any traction on this issue. It’s also one of the few issues where a substantial portion of both right wing and left wing folks agree. The NRA has such a stranglehold on politics in this country that it’s actually illegal for the CDC to even _research_ gun violence. Talk about suppression of liberty! There is nothing rational about it, it is purely an emotional issue and probably harkens back to our relatively recent birth as a nation and the many times citizens have been called upon to bring up arms against people trying to fuck with us. We are a weird country and the conflicts we have today are essentially the same conflicts of yesteryear. You want to start a civil war in this country? Try to take away people’s guns. I’m certain it’s one of the few issues over which large swaths of the American population would actually murder each other. I am dead serious. People go absolutely fucking apeshit over gun rights in this country. The US is an incredibly violent culture relative to other developed nations. Is it a net good? Probably not. But it is a civil right that’s never, ever, going to change. [QUOTE=enipla] As Dropo pointed out in post #248, in 1942, the SCOTUS voted 9-0 restricting ‘fighting words’ that “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” [/QUOTE] And in the 1970s the courts ruled that advocating for genocide through the use of the swastika doesn’t constitute ‘‘fighting words.’’ They determined that ‘‘fighting words’’ should be restricted to speech directed toward specific individuals. I learned that yesterday. From [here.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20408029&postcount=43) ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/392 "2017-08-14T03:21:10Z")
In Charlotte, a gang of 'alt rights" beat a black teen with heavy sticks right by the police station. In Charlotte, an “alt right” ran down a crowd, murdering one person. Let’s stop pretending this is about free speech, because it isn’t. The reports and video clearly show who the agressors are. Their own words and speeches and flags tell us who they are… and the guns they were carrying. An interesting thougt here too… It’s the South. If anyone other than Nazi white people did this, how many would have been clubbed, tasered, and shot by the police??? How come in THIS case, no police were “in fear for their lives” while these Nazis attacked and killed someone? ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/393 "2017-08-14T03:28:57Z")
> [@SteveG1](#): > > It’s the South. If anyone other than Nazi white people did this, how many would have been clubbed, tasered, and shot by the police??? > > How come in THIS case, no police were “in fear for their lives” while these Nazis attacked and killed someone? I’d hesitate to accuse the authorities themselves of racism. As I understand it Charlotte is really liberal and pretty much everyone was disgusted by the presence of white supremacists. Their primary sin seems to have been being woefully unprepared or the level of conflict that would ensue. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/394 "2017-08-14T03:31:03Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > I’d hesitate to accuse the authorities themselves of racism. As I understand it Charlotte is really liberal and pretty much everyone was disgusted by the presence of white supremacists. Their primary sin seems to have been being woefully unprepared or the level of conflict that would ensue. OK, it was probably an unfair question. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/395 "2017-08-14T03:44:37Z")
> [@SteveG1](#): > > OK, it was probably an unfair question. I mean, the South has racists and Nazis for sure, but imagine what it would be like to live in that area and be a perfectly normal, decent human being, and then have to deal with a bunch of scumbags coming in to publicly fuck up your reputation in the eyes of the world. It’s also a little bit misleading because it gives the impression that racism is a southern thing. I grew up in the Midwest, the north, a yankee, in an environment that was profoundly racist. I had two grandfathers in the KKK, one of which probably murdered people, the other of which was the sheriff of the lovely Howell, Michigan that has been in news recently for its virulent racism. The moment I met my grandmother’s second husband, when I was maybe twelve, the first words out of his mouth to me were ‘‘you better not date any niggers.’’ And in 1998, one of my high school best friends, who is half black, received a message written in her agenda that said, ‘‘Get out of this school, nigger, or this is the date you die’’ with a noose inscribed in one of the calendar days. 1998. It’s interesting how some people can grow up in this country and never have witnessed anything like that. You know, when people are skeptical that racism is still a popular motivation for discrimination, and make claims that liberals see racism everywhere which makes _them_ the racists – I mean holy shit, dude. I did see racism everywhere. I grew up in that. I’ve always been staunchly anti-racist (thankfully neither my mother nor father endorsed those views) yet I still struggle mentally with basic knee-jerk stereotyping bullshit because of the culture I grew up in. I was raised in a small town racist shithole in the _north_. Racism is a cultural shame we all share. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/396 "2017-08-14T03:46:58Z")
Charlottesville, y’all, not Charlotte, unless there some new atrocity I’m not aware of. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/397 "2017-08-14T03:55:42Z")
> [@Clothahump](#): > > Bullshit. And a big Thank You to **SteveG1** for providing the examples that **Clothy** will ignore, probably because he can’t read the bigger words. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/398 "2017-08-14T04:50:28Z")
> [@Clothahump](#): > > Bullshit. Shut the fuck up, **Precious Snowflake.** ---
**Author:** ![madmonk28](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madmonk28/32/20811_2.png) [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/399 "2017-08-14T05:33:02Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > It aint. Not even close. It’s a copout for personal shortcomings and insecurities and would better be handled by a therapist. Or in other words, “Build the Wall!” A copout for persona shortcomings and insecurities is pretty much Trump’s base. Racism and bigotry is not only a political viewpoint, it currently controls all three branches of the US government. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471/400 "2017-08-14T05:59:19Z")
You know, to me, from outside, all the useful idiots arguing for free speech sound like ordinary Germans who don’t realize it’s \*alr **e** ady \*11 November, 1938. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471.md?page=19) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unite-the-right-racist-scum/793471.md?page=21)