op rescue newman
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</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9. Troy Newman: The president of Operation Rescue jumped aboard the Trump train this week. An anti-choice extremist, Newman even co-authored a book with a would-be domestic terrorist, Cheryl Sullenberger, who in 1988 was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to blow up an abortion clinic. In that 2003 book, Newman and Sullenberger argue, according to People for the American Way, “that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.”</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Time was when a presidential candidate who played footsie with segregationists and white supremacists would have banished to the fringes of the American political scene. But Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has changed all that. </font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Oh sure, there have been plenty of codes telegraphed to the anti-black base of the GOP’s southern flank: Ronald Reagan’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html?_r=0" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi</a>, as the place to make a “states’ rights” speech in his 1980 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and “Silent Majority” framing. But after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expressions of outright racism were frowned upon in presidential politics. And articulations of misogyny were generally doled out in the form of <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/vice-presidential-debate-shockers-moments-forget/story?id=17435278#5" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">withering condescension</a>. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I don’t need to recount for you Trump’s friendliness with the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that was given a platform at Breitbart News by Stephen K. Bannon, the man Trump hired as his campaign CEO. You don’t need to take my word for it; <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">Bannon has boasted</a> of this fact. And you surely know of Trump’s <a href="http://fortune.com/donald-trump-white-supremacist-genocide/" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">numerous retweets</a> of posts and memes from white supremacist websites. And who can forget all of the lovely things he’s said about women, calling them fat pigs and demeaning them for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/07/trump-says-foxs-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">having menstrual periods</a>?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Just yesterday, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/mike-pence-capitol-hill-wary-gop-228081" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">declined for a second time</a> to say that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was “deplorable,” stating that he isn’t “in the name-calling business.” Isn’t it enough, Pence asked, that he and Trump have disavowed Duke’s endorsement?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump yesterday won the endorsement of Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, an anti-choice extremist who co-authored a 2003 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Their-Blood-Cries-Troy-Newman/dp/097203675X" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">book</a>, <a href="http://www.pfaw.org/press-releases/2016/09/pfaw-reacts-troy-newman-trump-endorsement-trump-s-new-effort-reach-women" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">according to People for the American Way</a>, that “argued that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.” In 1988, Newman’s co-author, Cheryl Sullenberger, was <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1988-05-06/local/me-2616_1_bomb-abortion-clinic" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">sentenced to three years in federal prison</a> for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On Friday, Donald Trump appeared before evangelical Christians assembled at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab convened by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council. The conference exhibit hall featured the booths of such co-sponsors as <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/anti-lgbt-march-supreme-court-dominated-group-celebrates-spanish-inquisition" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">Tradition, Family and Property</a>, a paleo-Catholic cult whose founder described the Spanish Inquisition as the church’s most glorious moment, and the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-clears-path-return-john-birch-society" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">conspiracy-theorist and segregationist John Birch Society</a>, which William F. Buckley thought he had managed to purge from the conservative movement in 1962. This was the first time the JBS appeared in the Values Voter hall of sponsors. It could be said that the Trump candidacy helped pave the way, what with his embrace of the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/dirty-trickster-and-trump-adviser-roger-stone-speaks-conspiracist-america-first-rally" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones</a>, and his numerous winks to white nationalist extremists.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The following day, FRC President Tony Perkins, who has endorsed Trump, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/tony-perkins-defends-alt-right" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">defended the alt-right</a> when I asked him about the movement at a press conference. Its existence, he seemed to say, was the fault of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for having “snuffed out” the voices of people who disagree with the administration’s policies.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To lay all of this at Trump’s feet would be to give him too much credit. As I’ve argued before, the misogynist, racist, nativist, anti-LGBT right wing that took over the GOP in 1980—of which Perkins himself is evidence—has much to answer for, not least of all, the rise of Donald Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. Trump may not have been the first choice of right-wing leaders, but they created the conditions that cleared his path to the nomination, and most have lined up behind him since he won it.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But mainstream media are also complicit in this normalization of hatred, allowing it to masquerade in the guise political positions. For decades, when reporting on the Christian right, for example, media have treated it as a religious movement, barely mentioning—if at all—the roots of movement positions in the segregationist backlash of the South. Instead, media executives allowed themselves to be cowed by the right wing’s outrage machine, every time it cranked up its conveyor belt of allegations of the anti-religion bent of reporters.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today, the same tendency is evident in the false-equivalence reporting prevalent in the degrees to which media cover different stories. Questions about Clinton’s emails demand teams of reporters toiling for months; scandals involving Trump are too often written as one-off reports—so fearful are mainstream editors of fielding an accusation of liberal bias.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the meantime, a monster has been allowed to grow in our midst. Bannon take an obscure fringe of the right and elevates it to a platform that garners tens of millions of pageviews per month. Trump hires Bannon. Media say, hey, that’s interesting, do one story, and say, “Next?”</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Covering the Values Voter Summit this September 9 and 10 was downright depressing. Trump addressed the conference on Friday, and Pence on Saturday—meaning that the conference attendees represent a legitimized constituency of the GOP, as they have for 30 years. The founders of the religious right are passing onto their just rewards. Organizers Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips died in 2008 and 2013, respectively; Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5 (but not before she took the opportunity to endorse Trump). The movement they founded, however, continues to wreak the havoc of hate on the American political landscape, and the media dare not call it by its name.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="line-height: 32px;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/normalization-evil-american-politics">http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/normalization-evil-american-politics</a></span></p></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></div>