Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Charles M. Blow: Trump Has Dragged Us Into the Gutter

The targets of the president’s rhetoric are experiencing a nightmare like no other in this country.

It is in times like this that we are able to measure just how low Donald Trump has dragged this country.

On Wednesday, Trump traveled to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Tex., the sites of massacres that played out over the weekend. But he went over the objections of many locals, including elected officials, who didn’t think a visit prudent, largely because of Trump’s own words and actions.

In the El Paso case, the shooting suspect used a framing and language of immigration and Hispanics that seemed to mirror Trump’s own.

But pause to consider the absolutely extraordinary nature of these events: As the nation mourns, some blame Trump for causing it, and believe his presence will compound the pain.

This is what Trump has done.

If you are one of the people in this country who feel personally targeted by Trump — immigrants, people of Mexican heritage, Muslims, people who are transgender, women, African-Americans — you know that we are experiencing this nightmare in a wholly different way, in a deeper way, than people who are not targeted.

When you are not the target of this man’s hate, you can object on moral grounds, as an exercise of principle. But you have chosen the fight.

For the targets, the fight chose us. It dragged us in. We have two choices: be pummeled or fight back.

Paul Krugman: Tariff Tantrums and Recession Risks

Why trade war scares the market so much.

If the bond market is any indication, Donald Trump’s escalating belligerence on trade is creating seriously increased risks of recession. But I haven’t seen many clear explanations of why that might be so. The problem isn’t just, or even mainly, that he really does seem to be a Tariff Man. What’s more important is that he’s a capricious, unpredictable Tariff Man. And that capriciousness is really bad for business investment.

First things first: why do I emphasize the bond market, not the stock market? Not because bond investors are cooler and more rational than stock investors, although that may be true. No, the point is that expected economic growth has a much clearer effect on bonds than on stocks.

Suppose the market becomes pessimistic about growth over the next year, or even beyond. In that case, it will expect the Fed to respond by cutting short-term interest rates, and these expectations will be reflected in falling long-term rates. That’s why the inversion of the yield curve — the spread between long-term and short-term rates — is so troubling. In the past, this has always signaled an imminent recession:

Rich Benjamin: When is Trump going to take white supremacist terror seriously?

After this latest massacre, we are all complicit when we look the other way. And no one is more complicit than the president himself

In a bloody weekend that saw two back-to-back mass shootings, a white male gunman left at least 20 people dead in a Walmart in El Paso, a majority Latino border town. Minutes before the attack on Saturday, the suspect, Patrick Crusius, published a 2,300-word manifesto, which was filled with white nationalist language and racist hatred toward immigrants and Latinos: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” he wrote.

The media, and Americans generally, are desperately wanting to make sense of yet another young white male mass shooter. And nothing Donald Trump has done or advocated for has remotely stemmed the epidemic of mass shootings since he took office. We should be treating online alt-right and white supremacist radicalization with the exact same seriousness with which we treat online jihadist radicalization. Unfortunately, we are far from doing that.

Michael H. Fuchs: The American right wing is enabling a dual crisis: gun violence and white supremacy

The right can no longer hide behind claims that the two issues should not be ‘political’

The increasingly intertwined threat posed by gun violence and white nationalist terrorists is real, evil and deadly – and it is being enabled and encouraged by Donald Trump and the right wing that he has emboldened and embraced.

Gun violence is the deadliest violent threat facing America today. The Centers for Disease Control recorded 39,773 deaths by firearm in 2017. And while it pales in comparison with the gun epidemic, white nationalist terrorism is a growing threat made more deadly by the availability of guns. The Anti-Defamation League noted that of the 50 deaths caused by domestic extremists in 2018, “white supremacists were responsible for the great majority of the killings”.

If this many Americans were killed in a war or foreign terror attack, the US government would be in crisis mode. The president would be convening meetings of the cabinet and state and local officials. Congress would be rushing legislation through the door quicker than legislators could read the bills. The media would cover the issue as religiously as it covers Trump’s tweets.

And yet, these issues hardly register in national policy debates, and the reason is the American right wing.

John R. Allen and Brett McGurk: We worked to defeat the Islamic State. White nationalist terrorism is an equal threat.

We both served as presidential envoys leading the U.S. global campaign to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group. In doing so, we worked with all departments and agencies of the U.S. government to develop a comprehensive and multifaceted campaign to defeat Islamic State terrorists on the battlefield, but also, and crucially, through counterfinance, countermessaging and information-sharing across the United States and globally. U.S. leadership and determined diplomacy built one of the largest coalitions in history, now standing at nearly 80 partners. [..]

Throughout, nobody questioned America’s resolve to find and defeat these terrorists and protect the homeland. Whenever one of us would hear excuses for terrorism from regional leaders in the Middle East — for example, condemning Islamic State atrocities but agreeing with underlying political grievances — we gave such arguments no quarter or excuse. There is no political justification for acts of mass murder of civilians. When political leaders give such acts cover, even inadvertently, the movement spreads and innocent people die.

The United States now faces a new national security threat. The enemy is not the Islamic State but domestic and homegrown white nationalist terrorism. And “terrorism” is the term that must be used. The strain of thought driving this terrorism is now a global phenomenon, with mass atrocities in Norway, New Zealand, South Carolina and also, law enforcement authorities suspect, El Paso. The attacks are cheered on by adherents in dark (but readily accessible) corners of the Internet. The terrorist acts may differ from Islamic State attacks in degree, but they are similar in kind: driven by hateful narratives, dehumanization, the rationalization of violence and the glorification of murder, combined with ready access to recruits and weapons of war.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Michelle Goldberg: Trump Is a White Nationalist Who Inspires Terrorism

Don’t pretend his teleprompter speech changes anything.

A decade ago, Daryl Johnson, then a senior terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a report about the growing danger of right-wing extremism in America. Citing economic dislocation, the election of the first African-American president and fury about immigration, he concluded that “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

When the report leaked, conservative political figures sputtered with outrage, indignant that their ideology was being linked to terrorism. The report warned, correctly, that right-wing radicals would try to recruit disgruntled military veterans, which conservatives saw as a slur on the troops. Homeland Security, cowed, withdrew the document. In May 2009, Johnson’s unit, the domestic terrorism team, was disbanded, and he left government the following year.

Johnson was prescient, though only up to a point. He expected right-wing militancy to escalate throughout Barack Obama’s administration, but to subside if a Republican followed him. Ordinarily, the far-right turns to terrorism when it feels powerless; the Oklahoma City bombing happened during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and all assassinations of abortion providers in the United States have taken place during Democratic administrations. During Republican presidencies, paranoid right-wing demagogy tends to recede, and with it, right-wing violence.

But that pattern doesn’t hold when the president himself is a paranoid right-wing demagogue.

Susan E. Rice: When the President Is a Bigot, the Poison Spreads

The consequences ricochet around the world and embolden our adversaries.

It’s hard to calculate the damage that President Trump’s overt racism and almost daily attacks on black and brown people are having on the fabric of our nation. With white supremacy bolstered from the Oval Office, hate crimes and domestic terrorism incidents are increasing, including, it appears, Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso.

At the same time, immigrants and native-born Americans live in constant fear of law enforcement officials emboldened to think they can act with impunity. Still, Mr. Trump revels in ripping off the fragile scab over the lingering sore that is our country’s historical racial divide, as if to ensure it never heals.

The president’s appalling goal, quite simply, is to pit Americans against one another for crass political purposes as well as, it seems, to vent his unabashed personal prejudice. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress by and large amplify his message through their deafening silence, abdicating their responsibility to serve our country above any political master and making a mockery of their claim to be “the party of Lincoln.”

Is there no floor to how low this president and complicit Republicans are prepared to go to divide America?

Yet, the consequences of Mr. Trump’s raw racism are not contained within America’s shores. They ricochet around the world as far away as New Zealand, poison the international climate and undermine America’s ability to secure our global interests.

Paul Krugman: Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism

Why do Republicans enable right-wing extremism?

Why has the Republican Party become a systematic enabler of terrorism?

Don’t pretend to be shocked. Just look at G.O.P. responses to the massacre in El Paso. They have ranged from the ludicrous (blame video games!) to the almost honest (who would have expected Ted Cruz, of all people, to speak out against white supremacy?). But as far as I can tell, not one prominent Republican has even hinted at the obvious link between Donald Trump’s repeated incitements to violence and the upsurge in hate crimes.

So the party remains in lock step behind a man who has arguably done more to promote racial violence than any American since Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization if there ever was one — and who was recently honored by the Republican governor of Tennessee.

Anyway, the party’s complicity started long before Trump came on the scene. More than a decade ago, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about a surge of right-wing extremism. The report was prescient, to say the least. But when congressional Republicans learned about it, they went on a rampage, demanding the resignation of Janet Napolitano, who headed the agency, and insisted that even using the term “right-wing extremism” was unacceptable.

This backlash was effective: Homeland Security drastically scaled back its efforts to monitor and head off what was already becoming a major threat. In effect, Republicans bullied law enforcement into creating a safe space for potential terrorists, as long as their violent impulses were motivated by the right kind of hatred.

Reverend William Barber: Left/right labels don’t help – we must build a fusion coalition to defeat Trumpism

Candidates should be clear about how Trump targets immigrants and people of color, but those policies hurt poor white people as well

Democratic presidential candidates had a chance both to present their campaign’s vision for America and to differentiate themselves from a broad field of 20 contenders. On healthcare, immigration, criminal justice reform and more, candidates responded to CNN’s questions by positioning themselves on the left/right spectrum that is often used to report political issues in public life.

But we make a serious mistake if we allow the extremism of Donald Trump’s administration to define a “right” against which Democrats position themselves as more or less “left”. This framing actually offers Trump an advantage because it normalizes his extremism and lawlessness.

Yes, there are real policy differences between Democratic candidates. But those differences pale in comparison to the moral and constitutional crisis America faces under Trump’s leadership. Now is not the time to poke holes in other candidates’ plans to guarantee healthcare and a living wage to all Americans. Now is the time for Americans to unite around leadership that can clearly name the corruption that led us to Trump’s presidency and build a broad coalition ready to move forward together in the south and the midwest.

Amanda Marcotte: Everyone knows Trump is a racist. So why can’t the media say it?

No one actually believes Donald Trump opposes racism. Not his critics. Not his supporters. Not anyone who tries to live in the zone of “objectivity.” Trump’s racism is a immoveable fact of life, like gravity or the sun.

And yet, somehow, the media continues to struggle to accurately convey to American audiences this reality, which is that when Trump, a racist and a liar, says anti-racist things, he’s just a racist who is currently lying.

This problem was illustrated Monday, when the New York Times previewed a headline about Trump’s response to two recent mass shootings that read, “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism”, causing an explosion of outrage in response, and causing the newspaper of record to scramble, changing it to “Assailing Hate But Not Guns” in the second print edition and the much more accurate“Shootings Spur Debate on Extremism and Guns, With Trump on Defense” for the online edition.

The furor illustrated a truly difficult struggle for media outlets in the Trump era, which is how to cover Trump statements that everyone knows are lies, but which cannot technically be proven to be false.

This is a classic example. On one hand, it’s technically true that Trump gave a speech Monday in which he did mouth the words “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”. It is also true is that his statement was as believable as if he said, “While many English translations of Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu‘ are beautifully wrought, I myself prefer to read the classic novel in the original French.”