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Trump's Syria strike, while widely praised in the mainstream media, drewsignificant backlash from the president's populist base. Now, five weeks later, Trump's first foreign trip has ushered in a new wave of criticism from his core group of supporters.

One week after the military action, British Infowars vlogger Paul Joseph Watson was joined on his Infowars show by Jack Posobiec, director at Citizens for Trump, where he explained why he'd jumped "Off the Trump train" the week prior.

"400,000 Syrians had died in this civil war over the past six years before the chemical weapons attack," he told Posobiec."Assad had been killing his own people for six years... it's a civil war; that's what happens."

Watson also noted that at a news conference in the Turkish capital, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted on March 30 that the Syrian people would determineAssad's fate.

"What changed one week later?" Watson asked. "The only thing I can see is Bannon beingdemoted."

Posobiec's answer: "A fundamental shift within the administration."

"It's a fundamental shift basically with him out of the picture, and with [National Security Adviser] H.R. McMaster now there,"he explained. "H.R. McMaster is tied to [former director of the Central Intelligence Agency] David Petraeus... [and] a lot of people that were involved with the Obama administration and the Bush administration, so having these people in there allows for them to create a way where they can feed Trump any assessments, any intel they want without any conflicting views."

According to Mike Cernovich, Trump isn't draining the swamp, he's drowning in it. And the Pizzagate-pushing conspiracy theorist also attributes Trump's shift to McMaster.

"More war is coming, and I don't know how to tell you the swamp is drowning Trump," he lamented.

On the other hand, there's been no shortage of ominous moments from Trump's first foreign trip, which kicked off with a record arms dealwith Saudi Arabia ($110 billion) on Saturday.

"I think it was a bad idea to go to Saudi Arabia," Infowars commentator David Knight announced Monday. He then drew on some of the eerie symbolism viewers may have missed.

President Trump, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi were "all standing there holding this orb with our hands on it," Knight explained. "Everybody's having a lot of fun with that picture, because they look pretty bad when they're lit from the bottom... but what nobody is paying attention to is that that was all part of a ceremony about setting up a global organization."

Of course, the symbolism was not lost on everyone. As Vox summed up:

Think about it for a second: This is Donald Trump the guy who campaigned on banning Muslim immigration to the United States and replacing globalism in foreign policy with America First literally holding a globe surrounded by Muslims. Thats absurd!

"I think he's not being very well served by the people who planned this trip,"Knight added, turning to what he believed was the worst photo-op; a sword dance with the Saudis and administration officials.

"I hope that... when they take these swords for the photo opportunities, that they've wiped the blood off of them," Knight said, referencing beheadings. "When you shake hands with people like that, sometimes you get blood on your hands, and we may wind up with blood on our hands in terms of this big arm deal, but of course [Trump's son-in-law] Jared Kushner was at the center of that."

Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her@alexpreditor.

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The Alt-Right Is Furious at Trump for His Foreign Trip - AlterNet

InfoWars, the alt-right site thats been widely blasted for spreading fake news, has acquired credentials to attend White House press briefings.

There have been previous attempts from the organization to win press access to the White House, with InfoWars getting a weekly pass to briefings earlier in the month.

InfoWars is led by fabulist Alex Jones, who has claimed that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax and that Michelle Obama is secretly a man who murdered comedian Joan Rivers.

Jerome Corsi, its Washington, D.C. corrspondent, was one of the popularizers of birtherism, the racist lie that former President Obama was born in Kenya, rather than the United States.

Trump and his associates have granted interviews and other forms of media access to InfoWars, which has been linked to the white supremacist alt-right movement.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

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InfoWars, 'Alt-Right' Fake News Site, Gets White House Press Credentials - Forward

Sen. Larry Taylor announces plans from the Senate Committee on Education during a press conference with Lt. Governor Dan Patrick on March 3, 2015.

Sen. Larry Taylor announces plans from the Senate Committee on...

AUSTIN - The fate of millions of dollars in education funding and school bathroom policies for transgender children hung in limbo Monday as lawmakers braced for the last full week of a legislative session marked by power grabs over contentious cultural battles in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

State lawmakers are set to adjourn May 29, but they have yet to resolve issues that have driven a wedge between the two chambers. The continued infighting, which often involves social issues like religion and class conflicts, could affect millions of public school students or spark a special session that could keep lawmakers in Austin into the summer.

Among the issues hanging in the balance is a short-term fix to the state's beleaguered school finance system that funds the education of 5.3 million children. Just after midnight Monday, the Texas Senate scrapped much of a House plan to revise how the state funds education, replacing it with a controversial school voucher program for children with disabilities.

The 12:50 a.m. vote marks the second time in two months the chamber has approved legislation giving parents education savings accounts, referred to as ESAs, to use public school dollars to subsidize student tuition at a private school. The Senate added the plan to House Bill 21 despite fervent opposition from House members who say the bill takes money away from public schools and constitutes a poison pill on legislation that would otherwise pour more than $1.5 billion into public education. In its current form, the bill would add about $500 million to the system.

Vouchers pin school choice advocates, including U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, against defenders of public schools out of the belief that applying a free-market mentality to public education would allow people to escape low-performing public schools and increase competition. Voucher opponents say the idea is a ploy to privatize education by siphoning funding to private and parochial institutions.

"Some people have built this into some kind of monster," said Sen. Larry Taylor, the Friendswood Republican who sponsored the bill. He added that the House's opposition to vouchers is unwarranted.

"It's like this little ESA mouse running around, and this elephant is like, 'Oh, oh my God,' freaking out about it and it's tiny," said Taylor, who estimates around 5,000 of the state's 5.3 million public school students would use the voucher in his bill.

'We have to want to'

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a strong supporter of vouchers, said Monday he was willing to go along with a House plan to push back the official start date of an A-F school and district grading scale until 2019.

"As I said last week, it is hard for me to believe any Texas lawmaker would vote against a half billion dollars for public schools, as well as voting against children with disabilities, simply to oppose school choice," Patrick said in a statement.

Opposition to a school voucher program is strong in the House, whose members voted overwhelmingly earlier this session to block any public funds from going to ESAs or similar initiatives.

"I don't see a path forward for House Bill 21 at this point," said Rep. Gary VanDeaver, a New Boston Republican who serves on the House Public Education Committee.

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

The panel's chairman, Dan Huberty, R-Humble, said he was "very disappointed" the Senate stripped much of the House's version of the bill originally meant to begin changing a school funding formula the Texas Supreme Court ruled was constitutional, though Byzantine and in need of repair.

"We have to want to be able to do this. Can't is not an option. That word shouldn't be in our vocabulary. It's won't," Huberty said, adding he plans to announce the House's response to the Senate changes Tuesday.

The bill likely to make the most movement on the school funding formula is Senate Bill 2144, which would create a 15-member commission to study how best to change or rewrite the state's school funding formula before the 2019 session. The Senate passed the bill earlier this month and the House tentatively approved it Monday on a voice vote.

New rules possible

Legislators this session may not agree on how to fund schools, but they could be on their way toward creating new statewide rules that would require public schools to provide single-stall bathrooms and locker rooms to students who, for whatever reason, do not want to use facilities designated by "biological sex."

The measure is the product of a national wave of GOP legislation focused on transgender people's bathroom use. On Monday, the House voted 94-51 to approve Senate Bill 2078, legislation regarding emergency disaster plans for schools, with the bathroom amendment attached. Rep. Chris Paddie, the Republican from Marshall who authored the amendment, said it would allow all students access to a single-stall bathroom or empty multi-stall facility, including those who are shy, have a colostomy bag or have other reasons they might want privacy. Democrats said the bill would discriminate against transgender students and make them targets for harassment by forcing them to use separate bathrooms.

The measure is not nearly as broad as Patrick wanted, as he had made legislating a sex-specific bathroom policy in state government buildings, colleges and schools a priority this year worthy of a special session. House Speaker Joe Straus implied Sunday that SB 2078 was as far as the House would go on the matter.

The bill now goes back to the Senate, which could accept the House's so-called compromise or reject it and call for a conference committee. Abbott has said he wants to sign some kind of "bathroom bill" this year.

Patrick said he has "concerns about its ambiguous language, which doesn't appear to do much."

In response, Straus said to put the onus on the Senate to ramp up its work."Now it's really time for the Senate to take care of the many House priorities that they know they've been sitting on. We'll just have to wait and see what happens," Straus said.

Bobby Cervantes contributed to this report.

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Education culture wars stifle GOP Legislature - Houston Chronicle

Mashable

Hillary Clinton Wikipedia page redirected to 'Mein Kampf' for 16 hours and no one noticed Mashable Despite how much we all love it, Wikipedia is not a credible source. That's because any one can edit content at any time, adding in falsehoods that can sit there until, well, someone notices. Case in point: a page dedicated to the bibliography of ...

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Hillary Clinton Wikipedia page redirected to 'Mein Kampf' for 16 hours and no one noticed - Mashable

Global Voices Online

A Wikipedia Made forand bythe Atikamekw First Nation in Canada Global Voices Online The Atikamekw Wikipedia is currently in the Wikimedia incubator, and the goal of the initiative, which is the first of its kind in Canada, is to have it one day join the hundreds of extant Wikipedias. It is a way to pass on ancestral knowledge using ...

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A Wikipedia Made forand bythe Atikamekw First Nation in Canada - Global Voices Online