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COMMENTARY

Ted Cruz Defends Clarence Thomas by Co-Opting Controversial Covers From a Black-Owned 1990s Magazine That Attacked Him

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In 1996, the nation’s most respected Black-owned magazine called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “a person who has done so much to turn back the clock on civil rights, all the way back to the pre-Civil War lawn jockey days.”

It published several highly-controversial, racist covers to pound home that point.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) unethically co-opted those images, falsely implied they were recent, and stated that they represent how Democrats and “the left” view Clarence Thomas today.

Given all the facts, the average American listening to Senator Cruz speak (video below) at Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court ethics would be forced to believe that Democrats from today traveled decades back in time to work with Emerge, that highly-respected Black-owned magazine in the 1990’s to create racist covers attacking Justice Thomas so they, along with their “lapdogs in the media,” could conspire to “smear” the far-right jurist today.

It’s a theory akin to the Republicans’ “birther” conspiracy about Barack Obama, whose mother, some conservatives apparently believed, had a birth announcement printed in a Hawaii newspaper in 1961 to allow her son, allegedly born in Kenya, to be deemed eligible to become President of the United States in 2008.

A casual viewer who might see Senator Cruz’s Tuesday attack on Democrats in defense of Justice Thomas would reasonably assume the magazine covers he showed during Tuesday’s hearing on Supreme Court ethics were published this year.

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In fact, they were published three decades ago, from 1993 to 1996.

Senator Cruz conveniently left that fact out of his afternoon diatribe, and he attempted to conceal the magazine’s publication date from the start of his rant, by leading with a magazine article that was published this year.

“Senate Democrats and their lapdogs in the media are engaged in a two-fold political campaign, number one to delegitimize the Supreme Court of the United States because they are angry that there are a majority of constitutionalists on the court,” Cruz said, referring to the 6-3 majority far-right justices hold. (Last year a study found the Supreme Court “is now more conservative than about 75% of Americans.”)

“But number two,” Cruz continued, “very directly this is a political campaign designed to smear Justice Clarence Thomas. And the reason is simple: the left despises Clarence Thomas, and they do not despise him because he’s a conservative. The left despises Clarence Thomas because he is a conservative, African American.”

“Here’s what Clarence Thomas said at [his] confirmation hearing. He said, ‘If you are a free thinking African American, ‘you will be lynched, destroyed and caricature by a committee of the US Senate.'”

“Well, in three decades, that hasn’t changed,” Cruz claimed. “It’s gotten worse. And to be clear, here’s the left’s view. I point to one article just three weeks ago: ‘The Democrats need to destroy Clarence Thomas’s reputation.'”

That article, an opinion piece in The New Republic, by its editor Michael Tomasky, followed one he had written in July of last year: “Sure, Impeach Clarence Thomas—but That’s Just for Starters.”

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“The story is much larger than a potential conflict in one Supreme Court case,” Tomasky wrote, referring to “Thomas’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, his vow in his concurring opinion that other privacy rights are next in his gunsights, and his refusal to recuse himself when he was the lone dissenter in the recent case in which the Supreme Court ordered Donald Trump to turn over certain documents to the National Archives, even as Thomas’s right-wing extremist wife was coordinating with the Trump White House to plot a coup.”

“All six conservative justices lied in their confirmation hearings,” Tomasky wrote. “What will Democrats do about that?”

Unlike on the right, where Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN are the generally accepted thought leaders, The New Republic does not speak for “the left,” nor does any publication or media outlet.

“I will tell you,” Cruz continued, “if you look at the next, that next poster board, the left has repeatedly attacked Clarence Thomas with a racism,” Cruz declared, now pointing to a magazine cover from 1996 – without once stating it was from the mid-1990’s. “This is a magazine cover that showed Justice Scalia every bit as conservative as Clarence Thomas, but he’s portrayed as the master and Clarence Thomas in a bigoted attack is portrayed as shining his shoes.”

“I’ll show you another one. To give you a sense of the racist vitriol from the left,” Cruz declared, implying that magazine cover as well was from 2023, despite also being from 1996. “Here’s a racist caricature of, ‘Clarence Thomas Lawn Jockey for the Far Right.’ This is the bigoted contempt the left has.”

“I’ll show you another, another magazine cover,” Cruz said, this time showing a 1993 cover that depicts Clarence Thomas “with an Aunt Jemima-like handkerchief on his head,” as the magazine’s editor wrote later, in 1996.

“Offensively, this is how the left views Clarence Thomas,” Cruz claimed, which most people on the left would state is false.

“Now it’s important for people at home to understand this is not about judicial ethics,” Cruz insisted, again, falsely. “This is not about judicial ethics. This is not about rules that should apply to judges across the board. We could have a reasonable discussion about that. This is about applying a double standard to Clarence Thomas and only Clarence Thomas.”

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Senator Cruz, to put it generously, is fibbing.

First, as Chairman Durbin noted in his opening remarks and several times throughout the hearing, Senate Democrats, including Durbin, since at least 2011 have been trying to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to fix its ethics problems.

Second, Justice Thomas is not the only Justice Democrats have been criticizing for what some would say is a lack of transparency and even possible corruption.

Justice Neil Gorsuch‘s sale of property, on the market for two years but sold just nine days after he was confirmed, to the head of a law firm, a law firm that argues before the Supreme Court. That sale is under public scrutiny, especially because the name of the head of the law firm was hidden via an LLC. Also under public scrutiny is Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife’s $10 million income from recruiting and placing lawyers in firms, some of which have business before the Supreme Court.

Now, about those racist magazine covers.

(NCRM takes no position on the covers.)

They were published 27 years ago by Emerge magazine, which ceased publication in 2000. It was considered the nation’s most respected Black-owned magazine.

The New York Times, in its 2016 obituary of Emerge’s editor in chief, George Curry called it, “a provocative, must-read newsmagazine for black readers.”

“The magazine caused an uproar in 1993 when it depicted Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, on the cover wearing an Aunt Jemima-style kerchief on his head,” The Times wrote. “Unrepentant, Mr. Curry returned to the same subject in 1996, this time showing Justice Thomas on the cover as a lawn jockey and, on an inside page, shining the shoes of Justice Antonin Scalia. In an editor’s note, he accused Justice Thomas of turning back the clock on civil rights.”

To be clear, Sen. Cruz told the American people that Democrats’ racism caused those images to be published.

In fact, it was Justice Thomas’ attacks on Black civil rights that did, according to Curry, who wrote in Emerge in 1996: “I apologize. Exactly three years ago, shortly after I took over as editor of Emerge, we ran a cover illustration of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, resplendent with an Aunt Jemima-like handkerchief on his head. In retrospect we were far too benevolent. Hence, this month’s cover with Clarence appropriately attired as a lawn jockey. Even our last depiction is too compassionate for a person who has done so much to turn back the clock on civil rights, all the way back to the pre-Civil War lawn jockey days.”

Senator Cruz did not share the truth about those images with America, but he did manage to use them for his own purposes.

Watch Senator Cruz below or at this link.

 

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COMMENTARY

‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

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1 month ago

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March 18, 2024

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National security, legal, and political experts are lining up to sound the alarm about the potential national security risks swirling around Donald Trump, and those warnings are getting stronger.

One month after Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his run for president, CNN reported on the real estate mogul’s repeated claims of great wealth. At one point Trump told supporters he was worth “well over $10 billion.” At other points Trump says, “I’m very rich,” and “I’m really rich.” CNN’s John King noted, “some voters see this as a virtue, in the sense that they think politicians are too beholden to special interests.”

Days later Politico ran with this headline: “Donald Trump’s new pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought.”

Fast forward nearly a decade later.

Donald Trump’s attorneys declared in court documents Monday that 30 companies all refused to secure a $464 million bond for Trump, which he owes the State of New York after losing his civil business fraud trial.

The sirens are now wailing.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

Citing a Washington Post report, MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes, “it’s now ‘expected’ that Manafort will be hired” to work on the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, “at least in part because the former president is ‘determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.'”

Manafort is Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman who in 2017, “surrendered to the F.B.I. and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” according to a New York Times report in October of 2017.

The Times also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “announced charges … against three advisers to President Trump’s campaign,” including Manafort, “and laid out the most explicit evidence to date that his campaign was eager to coordinate with the Russian government to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton.”

In 2019, NPR reported, almost as a footnote, that “a court filing that was inadvertently unsealed earlier this year, revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services.”

In his MSNBC report, Benen noted, “the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Manafort ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat‘ in 2016 due to his relationship with a Russian intelligence officer.”

“’The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign,’ the Senate report added.” Benen also reported: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report literally pointed to a ‘direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,’ it was referring in part to Manafort ‘directly and indirectly’ communicating with an accused Russian intelligence officer, a Russian oligarch, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.”

Benen reinforced his thesis, writing on social media: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed to a ‘direct tie’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services, it was referring in large part to Paul Manafort — who’s reportedly now headed back to Team Trump.”

Add to all that this plea from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic in a piece titled, “Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk.”

“Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building.”

After discussing “Trump’s open and continuing affection” for authoritarian dictators, Nichols notes, “even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.”

“That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg on Monday warned: “If Trump is given access to national security briefings he will now have someone with a proven history of selling stuff to the Russians on his team to help facilitate the movement of our intel to our adversaries.”

Also on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote on X: “We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump’s mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk.”

“After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgements that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million,” CREW reported February 29. “But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected.”

Diving deeper, CREW notes, “Trump left the presidency with at least $1.1 billion dollars in debt tied to the COVID-weakened commercial real estate market, the vast majority of which would come due in a hypothetical second term in office. These rulings would make that number 50% higher.”

“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.”

Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O’Brien, an MSNBC political analyst and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” observed, “Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests.”

“There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments,” O’Brien continues at Bloomberg. “Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Without a trial and public disclosure of more evidence, Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.”

O’Brien concludes, “the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

READ MORE: FBI Agent Furious Over MAL Search Thought Trump Would Return Classified Docs if Just Asked

 

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COMMENTARY

Trump’s New RNC Chair Flubs With a ‘Four Years Ago’ Gaffe

Published

1 month ago

on

March 15, 2024

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Pro-Trump Republicans over the past two weeks keep asking Americans if they are “better off today” than they were four years ago, and many Americans keep responding “yes.” The latest to serve up an affirmative answer, surprisingly, is Donald Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Whatley.

Appearing on Fox News Friday morning, Whatley gave the Reagan refrain a twist:

“At the end of the day, this comes down to a very simple contrast between President Trump and President Biden. Were you better off four years ago than you are today? The answer for this entire country is ‘no.'”

Trying to immediately clean up his comment, Whatley continued: “I mean, yeah, we are better off today – or we will be.”

For some, Whatley’s double flub served as yet another reminder of just how bad life was four years ago.

READ MORE: Legal Experts Hail ‘Best Ruling’ for Willis in Trump Prosecution Case

“Four years ago, I was hitting the grocery store at 5 am, hoping there’d still be toilet paper and face masks there, then coming home and trying desperately to supervise my kids’ remote schooling in between my own Zoom conferences,” wrote jazz critic and journalist Michael J. West in response to Whatley’s remarks.

The resurgence of the “four years ago” question appears to have been kicked off by House Republican Conference chair, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on March 6, when she stood before the cameras at a GOP press conference and told Americans, “As Ronald Reagan famously asked us, ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ The answer for hard-working Americans across the country is a resounding ‘no.’”

Her remarks were met in some corners with tremendous anger, with some seeing it as an affront to the more than one million Americans who would be dying from a COVID pandemic critics and medical experts say was worsened by then-President Donald Trump’s actions.

As NCRM wrote last week: On March 6, 2020, CNN had reported: “8 cases of coronavirus confirmed in Colorado,” “Kentucky confirms 1st coronavirus case,” “Son of nursing home resident with coronavirus describes fight to get mother tested,” “California’s Santa Clara County confirms 4 new coronavirus cases,” and, “Cruise passengers not told about coronavirus test results prior to Pence announcement.”

There may be a reason pro-Trump Republicans keep asking the question despite the answers they’re getting.

“Republicans don’t actually want you to remember 4 years ago,” Public Notice‘s Noah Berlatsky on Friday wrote. “It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that March 2020 was among the worst months in the history of the American republic.”

Pointing to Stefanik co-opting Reagan’s query, Berlatsky adds, “Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said virtually the same thing to Sean Hannity on Tuesday. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott echoed that sentiment on Fox News as well, saying, ‘We have to go back to that future, 2017-2020. We want those four years one more time.'”

READ MORE: Fox News Host Claims Trump ‘Not Charged With Obstructing’ Despite Multiple Counts

To claim Americans actually were better off four years ago, he continues, “requires a bizarre form of political, social, and economic amnesia.”

“Four years ago, in March 2020, the covid pandemic was rampaging across the world and country as the president desperately tried to wish it away. People were getting sick, many were dying, and the economy was shutting down as a result. It’s not a time to look back on with nostalgia.”

“It wasn’t just covid,” Berlatsky adds, reminding Americans who have forgotten.

“2020 was the year police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality and racism. In response, Trump told police and military leaders that they should ‘beat the fuck out’ of protesters and encouraged authorities to ‘just shoot them.’ In line with those sentiments, National Guard troops tear-gassed protesters in DC’s Lafayette Square while Trump staged a photo-op at a nearby church.”

Have Americans forgotten?

The New York Times apparently thinks so.

“Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?” The Times’ asked March 5 – one day before Stefanik invoked Reagan’s “better off” question – before observing, “memories of Mr. Trump’s presidency have faded and changed fast.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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COMMENTARY

Stephen Miller: Arrest ‘Commie’ Teachers, Use Government Power to ‘Defeat Evil’

Published

2 months ago

on

February 27, 2024

By

Former Trump aide Stephen Miller told the MAGA activists gathered near Washington, D.C. last week for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that conservatives must be willing to use power more aggressively against their opponents. He railed against district attorneys and other officials for not arresting teachers who violate new state laws that restrict teaching on race, gender, and sexuality.

Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, has been promising MAGA activists that if Trump returns to the White House, he “will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Miller’s America First Legal group is part of the far-right Project 2025, which has prepared a battle plan for the movement to “take the reins of government” in a new Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation, ringleader of the Project 2025 scheme, was at CPAC recruiting foot soldiers willing to carry out the plan.

In a recent article for Political Research Associates’ “The Public Eye” magazine, I noted that Project 2025 reflected a “movement-level, ideological shift away from a libertarian mistrust of government power and toward an authoritarian view of government power being used ruthlessly—whether as a righteous force wielded to advance a ‘biblical worldview’ or turned against an ‘administrative state’ supposedly captured by a radical Marxist left.”

Miller provided ample confirmation about the MAGA movement’s intentions, down to his dismissal of libertarianism as “a terrible ideology” that might be fine for academic debates but not in the real world, where he said public officials have a responsibility to “defeat evil.”

Excerpts from Miller’s appearance on a Friday, Feb. 23 CPAC panel:

Call it a mental illness, call it a spiritual failing, call it a moral deficiency, call it weakness, softness, or just being pathetic. There is something really broken in the conservative brain. They’re afraid not only of conflict, we know that. But there’s an even deeper fear, a deeper fear than all that, which is having power, and using power. Conservatives are addicted to the language of libertarianism, which is fine–you know, it’s a terrible ideology, but in an academic setting, okay, have these debates. …

You elect a state supreme court justice, you elect an Attorney General, and so on and so forth, to have an office with specific powers, duties, and responsibilities, with the expectation that they will use that authority to defeat evil, to protect the good, and to accomplish positive change in society. And you have to use that power fearlessly. …

A number of states, for example, have passed laws, saying that you can’t have this in the curriculum, or you can’t have that in the curriculum, and you can’t teach DEI and so on and so forth. Without exception, I can promise you, all the commies in the classroom changed the name of their lecture, changed one word, changed one little paragraph in the syllabus and did the exact same damn thing every single day because they’re communists and that’s what they do. Were they sued? No! Were they arrested if they broke a law and it’s applicable? No! Did any D.A. anywhere, if you’re talking about trans issues, think of arresting somebody for abusing children with trans ideology? No, we write blog posts about it. That’s what we do. So until we get serious, all the way down to the local DA, all the way up to the state A/G. and every office in between, including judges, electing people who have power and will use that power and measure their success by change in the real world, then we aren’t going to be able to beat the left.

This article was originally published by Right Wing Watch and is republished here by permission.

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