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In its evening newsletter then, the White House blasted the service under the headline Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda. The crime, as described by Dan Scavino, Mr. Trumps social media director, was positive reports on how China had handled its coronavirus outbreak. Mr. Trump promptly picked up the chorus. If you heard whats coming out of the Voice of America, its disgusting, he told a White House news briefing on April 15. What things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job.

What evidently rankled the White House was a clip showing people celebrating the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan, which accompanied a straightforward account by The Associated Press. V.O.A. officials were dumbfounded. It just came out of the blue, said Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran of Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who announced her resignation Monday as director of the V.O.A. The deputy director, Sandy Sugawara, formerly of The Washington Post and United Press International, also resigned.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Sugawara did not link their departures to the long-delayed confirmation of Mr. Pack, who becomes head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of the V.O.A., Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and some regional foreign broadcasters. In her farewell message, Ms. Bennett assured V.O.A. staffers that Michael Pack swore before Congress to respect and honor the firewall that guarantees V.O.A.s independence, which in turn plays the single most important role in the stunning trust our audiences around the world have in us.

It may be that Mr. Pack will respect the firewall he is sworn to maintain. His past is patchy he hired Mr. Bannon, an icon of the alt-right, as a consultant on two documentaries, including one about Adm. Hyman Rickover. He is also under investigation by the District of Columbia attorney general for possibly channeling money from a nonprofit group he oversees to his for-profit film production company. And he was confirmed along party lines. Before that, he had worked at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Council on the Humanities and served as president of the conservative Claremont Institute.

None of that confirms that if left to his own judgment, Mr. Pack would do Mr. Trumps or Mr. Bannons bidding, especially if it meant flouting the V.O.A.s legally mandated independence. What is certain, given Mr. Trumps record and his statements about V.O.A., is that this is what the administration expects and will forcefully demand. Mr. Trump wants a bullhorn, not a diplomatic instrument, and he insists on loyalty.

Read more here:
New Boss May Test Voice of Americas Credibility - The New York Times

The AFI Docs Festival is an annual film festival put on by the American Film Institute, usually in June in and around Washington, D.C. This year, the festival took place virtually, but perhaps unsurprisingly, several of the most prominent films touched on politics, including some with similarities to current events.

This year's festival wrapped up Sunday night; here are reviews of five of the most prominent films:

White Noise

A-

There have been several documentaries made about the ideological conditions that laid the ground for the Trump era, but White Noise, directed by Daniel Lombroso, may be the most illuminating. The director spent four years embedded with the alt-right, granted extraordinary access to three main subjects: "Dapper Nazi" Richard Spencer, masculinity guru-turned-political troublemaker Mike Cernovich, and white nationalist YouTuber Lauren Southern.

Lombroso spends the film's 90 minutes traveling the world with these three people, who are constantly flying to conferences, rallies or, in Southern's case, a weird adventure trying to block migrants in theMediterranean Sea. There are a few key takeaways: Spencer and Cernovich seem to hate one another, Southern clearly stole her schtick from Ann Coulter, down to the last vocal mannerism, and Spencer is a singularly pathetic figure who, despite a massive amount of media coverage, never actually led a movement of any significant size.By the end, hes living with his mother in Montana.

A weakness of the long lead time is the none of the three subjects can really be considered major figures in the alt-right today, and all three talk at one point or another about their desire to get out of political commentary altogether. But the films notable for its lack of didacticismit just allows its subjects to speak, without the talking heads or spooky music that tends to derail this sort of documentary.

Women in Blue

B

The festival's most timely documentary isDeirdre Fishel's Women in Blue, a film covering the Minneapolis Police Department, and dealing with issues of race, as well as violence and misconduct in that department. Consider it a spiritual prequel to everything we've seen in the past four weeks.

Women in Blue focuses on Janee Harteau, who at the time was serving as Minneapolis' first female police chief. The documentary also depicts other women in the MPD, against the backdrop of multiple controversial police-involved shootings. It's a compelling look at modern-day policing from a perspective not often seen in modern-day popular culture, though 2016's Do Not Resist remains the definitive documentary on that subject.

I knew that Harteau resigned in 2017, following the police shooting ofJustine Damond, but I figured the documentary would lead up to her resignation. Instead, it happens about one third of the way through. In the meantime, we see some now-familiar faces, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Freyseen admonished, in a mayoral debate, about not being tough enough on police misconductand the controversial police union head Bob Kroll. Women in Blue gives us some early clues that there was something dreadfully wrong going on in the Minneapolis Police Department.

Boys State

B+

If you were hoping that when it comes to politics, the youth of today will save us, and institute a more enlightened era than the one bequeathed to them by their parents, Boys State may disabuse you of that notion.

The doc, a Sundance debut that will appear on Apple TV+ later this year, takes a look at Texas Boys State, an annual leadership conference in Austin in which teenaged Texans act out the legislative process. Directed byAmanda McBaine andJesse Moss, Boys State follows six participants, of various political persuasions that run the gamut from liberal to reactionary. The participants are well-chosen, as they navigate a process that resembles Lord of the Flies, had it been set in a state legislature. They also seem equally inspired by Karl Rove, and by WWE, as they re-create Daniel Bryan's "Yes" chant.

Boys State is exceptionally produced and edited, from what must have been a gargantuan amount of footage. But it shows that, whether it's extremism or cynicism, the politicians of tomorrow aren't likely to differ from those of today.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn

B-

There was already a documentary about Roy Cohn, called Where's My Roy Cohn? which came out less than a year ago. That film, directed byMatt Tyrnauer,both ran through Cohn's well-told life story, and examined his ties to Donald Trump, including the lessons that the President likely learned from his former mentor.

Now,Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, which does all of that as well. The twist is that this one was directed by Ivy Meeropol, the daughter of the Rosenbergs, whose conviction and execution was, in part, engineered by Cohn. The film showed at AFI Docs ahead of its premiere on HBO last week.

Taking its title from the inscription on Cohn's square of theAIDS Memorial Quilt, Meeropol's film features covers much of the same ground asTyrnauer's doc, including the Trump stuff, Cohn's regular appearances on talk shows, and his death from AIDS. The biggest difference is the testimony of the director's father and uncle, as well as some footage of Nathan Lane playing Cohn in the Broadway revival of Angels in America.

Meeropol already made a documentary in 2004, Heir to an Execution, about her family's story, which was notable in that it depicted them coming to terms with the revelations that Julius Rosenberg really did spy for the Soviets. While a worthwhile examination of Cohn's life, Bully. Coward. Victim is less compelling than either the earlier Cohn doc, or Heir to an Execution.

Jimmy Carter: Rock n Roll President

B

Here's one that's about exactly what its title says it's about. Directed byMary Wharton, the film explores the musical side of the 39th president, from the gospel music he grew up listening to in Georgia to his embrace by various rock and country stars once he became a national political figure. This would seem a thin reed to hang an entire documentary on, but the filmmakers have collected talking heads from Bob Dylan to Willie Nelson to Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, in addition to Carter himself.There's also a lot of footage of Johnny Cash,although we learn that, despite years of insisting otherwise, Carter may not have really been June Carter Cash's cousin.

There are fun stories, likely to be enjoyed by anyone who's interested in the music or the politics of the late-1970s, although the movie omits that great but possibly apocryphal story, often told by Arlo Guthrie,about Chip Carter finding "Alice's Restaurant" in the White House record library, and noticing that the song, much like the gap in the Watergate tapes, was 18 and a half minutes.The film will air on CNN later this year.

Link:
Five Political Films at the 2020 AFI Docs Festival - Splice Today

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Aaron Barmer stands across the street from the Stonewall Jackson Hotel and Conference Center in Staunton for the seventh day in a row on Friday, June 19, 2020 in protest the hotel being named after a confederate general.(Photo: Monique Calello/The News Leader)

STAUNTON It's been a week since Aaron Barmer began standing outside the Stonewall Jackson Hotel and Conference Center in protest of the hotel being named after a confederate general.

He and a group of protestors come to the hotel during check-in time between 4 and 6 p.m. every day. While some of the protestors masked faces might change from day to day, Barmer is always there.

It's also been one week since he and Arrow Kilbourn, who also protests daily, sent an email to Staunton City Council asking them to make a public statement showing support for the hotel's owner decision to change the name. Three days went by and the only person to respond was Ophie Kier as an outgoing member of city council.

More: Stonewall Jackson Hotel owners pledge to change Confederate name

Outgoing city council member and Vice Mayor Ophie Kier spoke to a crowd in Staunton at a rally for George Floyd, a black man who died in Minneapolis after a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyds neck for nearly nine minutes.(Photo: Patrick Hite/The News Leader)

"Much has happened in our nation, our state and city in recent weeks. To say this is an understatement. With the viewing of an American citizen being killed by several police officers on national TV, around the world there has been an awakening in those that have suffered at the hands of oppression for generations, even centuries.

"For far too long Black America has done what was necessary to keep peace everywhere we live. While we mourn the taking of George Floyds life there are far too many others that have not been mentioned and even more forgotten. Unless and until we come to the understanding that there would be no America as we know it without the strength, endurance, genius and will to survive of that enslaved human we will sadly not grow. We shall not survive.

"The contribution of those enslaved people are far too numerous to mention and the use of statues and naming of properties that was done to intimidate must come to an end.

I am one however that knows we cannot erase history and feel that the place for these are in museums so that I may teach my grandson what evil looks like.

"The names on buildings such as the Stonewall Jackson Hotel must be changed."

Ophie A. Kier

The Stonewall Jackson Hotel in downtown Staunton.(Photo: Mike Tripp/The News Leader)

On Friday, Barmer had a conversation with owner of Mill Street Grill and Staunton City CouncilmanTerry Holmes, who explained to him some of the many moving parts that are going to be involved in the process of changing the hotel's name.

"It seems like the company continues to be in motion in making this happen," Barmer said. "There may be a need for historic preservation to sign off on some things."

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Barmer urged Holmes to lead a statement and make sure city council puts out a statement that they acknowledge the name change andare working to expedite the process."

"And most of all that they support what we're trying to do."

On Juneteenth Day, the City of Staunton republished their statement on racial justice they posted the previous week.

"But absent from that was anything looking like a solution," said Barmer. "And to me, we're a solution for making good on that statement."

Staunton City Council full statement here.

Barmer said the name change is under city council review per his discussion with Holmes.Holmes told him that it's going to take some time to coordinate with the hotel owners and to figure out what the ramifications are for historic preservation certification and codes.

"I reiterated to himthat whatever the story is with that, it cannot be an excuse," said Barmer. "Historic preservation codes cannot have priority over the removal of a confederate general's name over the Staunton skyline."

The group of citizens protestingare looking to Holmes totake the lead in city councilissuing a public statement specific to the name change for the Stonewall Jackson Hotel.

"We need to see that the city, not just the company, is taking seriously their recent statement on supporting racial justice in Staunton," Barmer said. "This is an excellent opportunity for them to demonstrate that. Transparency is going to have to be the way of the walk here."

The statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee stands in the center of the renamed Emancipation Park on Aug. 22, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. A decision to remove the statue caused a violent protest by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and members of the 'alt-right'. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images)

The protestors have been met with mixed reactions.

More: Area reacts to proposed name change of Stonewall Jackson Hotel

Barmer is paying attention to the traffic on social media to see how their stories and photos of them are being shared.

"I'm seeing numerous indications that confederate-minded people, whether here or further abroad connected through social media that there's a lot of complaints," said Barmer. "I did see one comment that the hotel should come out with guns and scare us off."

"They ought to take out a gun and tell them get the heck out," commented Laurie Gleason Roy in the Northern Confederates Facebook group.

"Tell these people to take a walk over a mine field," commented Karl Blake in the Confederate Keepers Facebook group.

"Had the South won the war, none of this nonsense would be happening today," commented Jason Ford.

While the protestors have been met with negative reactions from those in favor of keeping the name, they have also been met with support from those who want the name of the hotel changed and the red neon sign with the confederate general's name down.

As of June 19, Barmer has not received any direct threats, but did say he's seen himself named in a few groups.

As of Monday night, Council member Holmes hasn't gotten back to Barmer with an update.

More: Every Confederate monument taken down in Virginia in 2020

More: Confederate-named roads around Staunton. What would it take to change them?

More: As Richmond's Confederate statues go, so might the South's

More: 'We all know it's time': Northam directs removal of Robert E. Lee statue

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Reporter Monique Calello can be reached at mcalello@newsleader.com and on Twitter @moniquecalello.

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Stonewall Jackson Hotel: 'The use of statues and naming of properties that was done to intimidate must come to an end.' - The News Leader

Among dozens of addled tweets from the commander in chief over the past few days, one in particular deserves pausing over because it demonstrates not just the weak-mindedness of our president but also the way his leadership is sabotaging conservatism.

Trump retweeted a post featuring disgraced columnist Michelle Malkin, who complained about being silenced on social media. Trump responded: The radical left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!

In the name of standing up for aggrieved conservatives, Trump soils the brand. First, a detail. The radical left is not in control of those outlets, and even if it were, they are private entities and therefore perfectly free to make their own judgments about content. There is nothing illegal about it. If the administration (SET ITAL)were(END ITAL) working to remedy the situation, that is what would be illegal. Another detail: Trump has 19.7 million followers on Instagram, 26.7 million on Facebook and 80 million on Twitter. Perhaps what keeps him so popular is his audiences inexhaustible appetite for whining.

The woman Trump thanked is a columnist and social media entrepreneur who was a respected member of the conservative commentariat emphasis on the past tense. In the past two years, she has been shunned by respectable conservative outlets. She is no longer welcome at CPAC. The Young Americas Foundation has dropped her, and the Daily Wire and National Review discontinued her syndicated column.

The occasion for the deplatforming was Malkins swan dive into the right-wing fever swamps. In 2017, she endorsed alt-right candidate Paul Nehlen (Paul Nehlen slams ... corporate open-borders elites!), and contributed to the VDARE website which frequently hosts white nationalists, racists and anti-Semites.

Her most grotesque relationship though, and the one that got her booted from the Young Americas Foundation, was with a group calling themselves groypers, led by a 21-year-old YouTube host named Nick Fuentes. To get a sense of just how loathsome this figure is, have a look at this video in which he wonders, grinning, about whether 6 million cookies could really be baked in ovens and how the math doesnt add up. Holocaust jokes. How droll. Fuentes, you will not be shocked to learn, is one of the very fine people who marched with neo-Nazis at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Remember Pepe the Frog? Hes their mascot. He described the mass murder in an El Paso Walmart as an act of desperation. Turning Point USA is too tame for his tastes, and his group has lately been heckling speakers like Ben Shapiro, Dan Crenshaw and even Donald Trump Jr.

Yet, Malkin has declared herself the mother of groypers and called them good kids. When she was rebuked by mainstream conservatives, she declared her allegiances proudly:

They want me to disavow Nick Fuentes and VDARE and Peter Brimelow and Faith Goldy and Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys and Steve King and Laura Loomer and on and on.

They did want that, but now Trump has vitiated that work by praising Malkin. The thing Trump retweeted was not actually a Malkin post, but a tweet of Malkin speaking to the Western Conservative Summit. America First Clips is a feed for one of Fuentess outlets. Naturally, Fuentes is gloating.

Trump defenders will no doubt protest that Trump knew nothing of Malkins descent into neo-Nazi land. But thats no excuse. In fact, Trump probably did not know much about those he praised, either Malkin or, by extension, Fuentes. But he has a duty to know. Yes, hes an indolent ignoramus, but guess what, the taxpayers are paying for a huge staff. He has people who can check. He doesnt use them because he doesnt care. His moral reasoning is primitive. If you are pro-Trump, no matter what else you are (a murderous dictator, a racist troll), youre fine in his book. Loutish protesters harass a TV journalist using the F words (fake news and, you know, the other one), and Trump proclaims them great people. He has no objective moral standards. Everything is about him. On a scale of moral reasoning, he is subzero. But the world of conservative opinion-shapers does still attempt, however weakly, to maintain some guard rails. With every passing day of Donald Trumps leadership, those standards crumble a bit more.

Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her column is syndicated by Creators.

Originally posted here:
Charen: Trump smashes the right's ability to police itself - The Winchester Star

One thing we know for sure about Donald Trump is that he doesnt change. On Tuesday, he was back on Twitter claiming that an expansion of mail-in voting would lead to rampant voter fraud and regurgitating a groundless conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, was involved in the murder of a former member of his staff, Lori Klausutis, who died in 2001. In another Tweet, Trump threatened to close down Twitter and other social-media platforms if they silence conservative voicesby which he means if they take away his right to spread all sorts of lies and smears in the run-up to November.

Trumps demagogic use of social media has been a blight on American democracy for years, of course, but the stakes are now bigger than ever. With a little more than five months left until the election, he is behind in the polls and struggling to overcome the popular perception that he mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. The official mortality toll is about to hit a hundred thousand, and, due to uncounted deaths, the real toll is almost certainly higher. In these circumstances, Trumps relection prospects hinge on his ability to rewrite history, create diversions, and vilify his political opponents and critics. Like Squealer, the propagandist pig in George Orwells Animal Farm, Trump is asking the citizenry to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and believe made-up tales. What is different is that Trump is using social media to distribute to his followers their daily diet of disinformation, resentment, and incitement.

On Tuesday morning, when Trump took to Twitter, he had little reason to believe that his posts would provoke anything other than the familiar reactions: thousands of angry comments, tens of thousands of likes, and some tut-tuts from his media critics. The unwillingness of the big social-media platforms to rein him in is so well established that it has descended to the level of a bad joke. To companies like Twitter and Facebook, politics is a revenue stream, and the stream flows fullest when the politics is bitter and divisiveor, in a word, Trumpian. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook shut down an internal team of researchers after it had warned the companys leadership that the platforms algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Twitter, for its part, has repeatedly promised to remove false and incendiary material, but it has also conspicuously failed to apply its rulebook to the political arsonist in the White House.

On Tuesday, Twitter took a small step in the right direction, by flagging the factual inaccuracy of a pair of Trumps tweets about mail-in ballots and voter fraud. Underneath these tweets, it inserted a blue exclamation mark and a link that read, Get the facts about mail-in ballots. If you click on this link, you land on a page with the headline Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud and also links to a series of articles contradicting the Presidents claims. The company said that these alerts were in line with a previously announced pledge to apply fact-checking labels to tweets that contain misinformation.

But, for some unexplained reason, Twitter didnt flag another Trump tweet, in which he claimed that he had provided the nations governors with unlimited Testing for the coronavirus, which also was a blatant lie. And the company refused a written request from the widower of Lori Klausutis to take down Trumps tweets about his late wifes death, which Trump has used to smear Scarborough, despite the fact that Scarborough was eight hundred miles away when it happened. Klausutis worked in Scarboroughs Florida office when he was a Republican congressman. A medical examiners report said that she died of a blood clot in the brain subsequent to a fall precipitated by heart disease. Trump picked up on an Internet conspiracy theory that the death was a homicide, and that Scarborough was involved. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so, Trump wrote a couple weeks ago. On Saturday, he urged his followers to keep looking into the death of Klausutis, who worked in Scarboroughs office when he was a Republican congressman. On Tuesday, he again referred to Scarborough as Psycho Joe, adding, So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I wont bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?

In his letter to Twitters C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, Timothy Klausutis pointed out that the conspiracy theory about his wifes death had caused a great deal of anguish to her family. Even some loyal Republican voices blanched at Trump promoting it. We suppose there are some Trump followers who enjoy this, the editorial page of the New York Post said. The libs say horrible things about you, go ahead and say terrible things about them! There is a difference, though, between mocking someones ratings and hurting an innocent family with the memories of their tragic daughter because of a petty feud.

Scarborough told the New York Times that Trumps calls for a police investigation of one of his political critics had echoes of Vladimir Putins Russia and Viktor Orbns Hungary. Timothy Klausutis said that, if an ordinary Twitter user like him had posted something so incendiary, he would have been banned from the platform. Twitters list of rules explicitly states that users may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. And yet Twitter refused to take down Trumps tweets on the flimsy grounds that Scarborough is a public figure.

To an amoral serial offender such as Trump, that is an invitation to keep at it. As long as he targets people in the public domain, he can evidently say anything he wants, and amplify any conspiracy theory that appears from the feverish swamps of the alt-right. In a redux of the 2016 Pizzagate disinformation campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., recently posted on Instagram a meme that accused Joe Biden of being a pedophile. Facebook, which owns Instagram, took no action against Trump, Jr. How long before his father joins in? If the social-media companies dont do more to meet their responsibilities as publishers and de-facto public utilities, it probably wont be long. There is no sewer so vile that Trump wont wade into it, dragging the entire country along. Thats another thing we know about him.

See the rest here:
Fact-Checking Donald Trump on Twitter Wont Stop His Demagoguery - The New Yorker