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Although Donald Trump has repeatedly appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in the last year, the company is asking that a framed cover image of Trump be taken down from the walls of several golf clubs.

That's because the cover hanging in several Trump Organization clubs is a phony, a Time spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.

The March 1, 2009, cover was first identified as fake by The Washington Post in a story published on Tuesday, and several markers give away that the cover isnt genuine.

The magazine's red border is thinner on the Trump cover than a real cover and is missing a thin, white border on the inside of the red. A barcode in the right-hand corner is the same as a design tutorial created by a Peruvian designer, according to the Post.

Headlines on a real cover appear across the top of the page. The fake covers headlines appear down the right side.

Another factor complicating the authenticity of the Trump cover Time didnt publish a March 1, 2009, cover, according to the Post. It published a cover featuring actress Kate Winslet the following day.

On the mocked-up cover, which is framed and hung in some of the Trump golf clubs, according to the Post, Trump appears with arms crossed beneath a banner that reads, TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS EVEN TV!

In the lower left corner, beneath Trumps name, a headline reads, The Apprentice is a television smash!"

Other headlines discuss real stories that appeared in the Kate Winslet issue, including a story about then-President Barack Obamas plan for health care and another about global warming.

Related: Sarah Palin Sues New York Times Over Editorial Linking Her to Violence

Its unclear who mocked up the fake cover and why, and its also not known if Trump himself was ever aware of the fake cover.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to NBC News request for comment.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who broke the story, said he had tallied seven locations where the cover was spotted as of Wednesday morning, and was continuing to look for additional sightings.

Scott Keeler, a photojournalist for the Tampa Bay Times, posted a photo on Twitter of the framed Time cover hung on the wall of Trumps Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago.

Despite the fake cover, Trump has appeared on the front of the magazine several times. First, before he got into politics, Trump appeared on a 1989 cover holding an ace of diamonds next to his face.

The teaser read, This man may turn you green with envy or just turn you off. Flaunting it is the game, and Trump is the name.

After announcing his campaign to become president and his election, Trump has appeared on the cover of Time in both photos and illustrations more than a dozen times.

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Time Asks Donald Trump's Golf Clubs to Remove Phony Magazine Cover - NBCNews.com

Tuesday was a glorious day for those who believe that the free press is all thats keeping America from being made great again. It saw the right escalate its war on the media, in part because of mistakes committed by CNN and The New York Times. Those errors may have been troubling, but they were corrected quickly and unambiguously.

Far more troubling was the response of the pro-Trump camp, which zealously sought to discount all journalism on the basis of those two mistakes, to weaken an emboldened press corps by revealing its supposed anti-Trump biases. Those biases may exist, but if they do, the White House has done a marvelous job of confirming them at every opportunity with its own incompetence, maliciousness and dishonesty.

What the president really wants was best articulated in a New York Times interview with chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon earlier this year. The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while, the splenetic nationalist said. The media here is the opposition party.

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Tuesdays developments were unrelated, except they showed how eagerly Trumps supporters will pounce on the media mistakes while ignoring the presidents penchant for conspiracy theories and alternative facts, if not outright deceptions. They see nothing wrong with holding CNN to a far higher standard than the White House, to scrutinize the words of a Times editorial while dismissing Trumps tweets as harmless presidential fun.

CNNs troubles stemmed from a story, published last Thursday, about Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier and Trump supporter. The article made allegations about Scaramuccis supposed dealings with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads a Russian investment fund. Scaramucci complained to CNN head Jeff Zucker, reportedly threatening a $100 million lawsuit. The story was retracted, three staffers resigned and Scaramucci tweeted, Apology accepted. Everyone makes mistakes. Moving on.

Related: Trump's perfect press secretary

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures and declares "You're fired!" at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, June 17, 2015. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter

But while Scaramucci took the high road, Trump took the low one. He lambasted CNN in tweets unbefitting a candidate for the Palookaville Municipal Advisory Council, let alone the leader of the free world:

His deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, channeled the same contemptuous attitude at Tuesdays daily White House press briefing. She railed against the constant barrage of fake news that is directed at this president. Of course, she couldnt name a single story that was fake. Sanders did, however, take a swipe at CNN, which she said had been repeatedly wrong and had to point that out or had to correct it.

Yes, absolutely. When a news outlet is wrongand every news outlet gets it wrong sometimesit acknowledges its mistakes and corrects them. Meanwhile, Trump trots out his press secretary to lie about inauguration crowds while spreading lies about the FBI, Hillary Clinton and anyone else he sees as an opponent. Its no secret that Trumps favorite show is Fox & Friends, which CNNs media reporter Brian Stelter calls Trumps safe space because it showers the president with positive attention.

Tuesday also saw Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, file a lawsuit against The New York Times, for an editorial published in mid-June. The Times editorial in question, titled Americas Lethal Politics, came after the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise in northern Virginia. The shooter, James Hodgkinson, was a vociferous supporter of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

In its editorial, The Times alluded to the 2011 of shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords by Jared Lee Loughner. The original piece suggested Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. It specifically cited a map published by a political group affiliated with Sarah Palin. The editorial, as originally published, described the map as showing Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

But the descriptions of Loughners intentions, and Palins map, were both erroneous. The Times was forced to issue a two-part correction:

An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.

That wasnt enough for Palin who filed suit against the Times on Tuesday. Notably, two of the lawyers she is using successfully litigated the invasion of privacy suit filed by Terry Gene Bollea, professionally known as Hulk Hogan, against the gossip website Gawker, which had published a sex tape of Bollea in sexual congress with the wife of a friend. Bollea was awarded more than $100 million by the jury, a decision that led to Gawkers demise.

Michael J. Naborski, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Pryor Cashman LLP whose expertise is defamation, says Palin may well have standing in her suit against the Times. A media defendant does not automatically escape the possibility of liability under a libel claim by issuing a retraction or a correction, he told me in an email. Palins attorneys will certainly argue that the two corrections were insufficient as a matter of law to even qualify as a correction and retraction. But even if they were, they did not serve to mitigate any of the damage caused to her reputation and feelings by the initial article.

Lets get something basic out of the way. The Times should have gotten the facts right, especially in an editorial that was presumably reviewed by multiple members of its editorial board. I say this as someone who spent several years as a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News. While the role of the unsigned editorial has no doubt diminished, it remains the voice of the newspaper (specifically, its publisher). The facts around the Giffords shooting were not obscure or in dispute. The Times had a duty to get them rightand, given its journalistic talent, should have done so. It doesnt have to like Palin, but it does have to be honest about what she did and didnt say.

At the same time, the paper swiftly corrected its errors. Thats what a publication is supposed to do. Thats what CNN did, too. The free press cant be flawless, but it must be accountable.

Palin, meanwhile, is preposterous in complaining about offended sensibilities, as much as Trump is crowing about CNNs supposed deceptions. The suit her lawyers filed says that it took Mrs. Palin years to overcome the detrimental impacts of the false speculation that she caused Loughner to commit murder. Unfortunately, members of the media perceive Mrs. Palin as a convenient target for attacks against conservative policies and a subject likely to spark readership interest.

One wonders why Palins tender sensitivities werent similarly injured during the 2008 presidential race, when her campaign rallieson behalf of GOP nominee John McCainfrequently descended into expressions of hatred against then-candidate Barack Obama. She eagerly stoked that anger, accusing Obama of palling around with terrorists, leading some to wonder if violence against the Democratic candidate was inevitable.

Palin didnt get any calmer after the election, when she joined the bastion of civility and sensitivity that is Fox News. She called the president Barack Hussein Obama, using his foreign-sounding middle name to suggest the he wasnt quite American. Last year, during the presidential race, she called Obama a special kind of stupid. Later, after Trump won the 2016 election, she went to the White House with country singer Ted Nugent, whod once told Obama to suck on my machine gun and deemed Hillary Clinton a worthless bitch, among many other inciteful statements.

Sarah Palinvoice of conservative values and beacon of faith and family, according to her Times lawsuitdidnt appear troubled by any of that.

But as Niborski explains, it is possible that what she really wants isnt money. Part of the goal of certain plaintiffs is not necessarily to win a libel case, but rather to force media defendants to spend money on defending themselves, and therefore make it less likely that they will target a certain public figure in the future. In other words, Palins goal is to punish the Times, just as it was Bolleas goal to punish Gawker.

There was another media-related development on Tuesday, one that didnt involve a lawsuit. David A. Fahrenthold of The Washington Post found that some of Trumps golf resorts are decorated with a fake Time magazine cover that crows about his Apprentice being a television smash.

It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to attack the free press while using fake magazine covers for decor. More than that, it takes a profound insecurity, the kind of thing most people overcome in high school. What Trump fears, above all, is not that we will uncover some Nixonian plot involving Russia. Rather, what makes Trump afraid is that we, the people, will see him for his astonishing smallness of spirit, his lack of vision, his boundless vanity.

A man who wraps himself in fakery will see fakery everywhere.

Continued here:
Donald Trump vs. CNN: How the White House Just Escalated Its War on the Free Press - Newsweek

"Can I get some sunscreen?" one young Nazi asks another young Nazi near the Lincoln Memorial where the alt-right's "Free Speech" rallythe more edgy of two right-wing rallies scheduled for the same time in Washington, D.C. on June 25is about to kick off.

The second rally, which is supposed to be "against political violence," splintered off from the first once alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer was invited. Spencer and his supporters call Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and the other viral right-wingers leading the competing march "alt-light" because they are less openly racist and mostly fall in line with Trump. Who these "free speech" Nazis are specifically, their names, where they came from, the specifics of their beliefs, doesn't matter and many don't call themselves Nazis but that doesn't matter either (FWIW: they prefer "tribalists" and/or suggest white pride is like black power or whatever and shouldn't be a big deal).

The Nazi in need of sunscreen eventually gets some from a Baby Huey-like Nazi wearing a baseball helmet and holding a "Join, or Die." flag. Bounding up the steps past Baby Huey is neo-Confederate Jason Kessler, who waves a Confederate flag and yells that Lincoln was a traitor in the direction of D.C. United Against Hate's nearby counter-rally.

"The South will rise again," someone snickers.

"Fuck Palestine," a kid, probably 15, mumbles.

"Bill Clinton is a rapist" another yells.

And then, a bunch of ostensibly grown-ass men, all part of Identity Evropa, a white Nationalist group, most in white polos and khakis and at least onean older guy in a motorcycle helmetsieg heil-ing, arrive with synth-pop of the foggy faded sort playing from portable speakers.

A few of the Identity Evropa guys are Spencer's bodyguardsand their presence signals that he has arrived, which means the media gathers for an impromptu pre-rally Spencer presser.

Spencer tells cameras that he is "not a white supremacist."

"I don't want to rule over other races," he says. He is just worried about whites "not having a safe space for their families."

And unlike the alt-light, Spencer says, he isn't blindly for the Donald: "Donald Trump has been very disappointing and I am very worried about his presidency. He can obviously redeem himself in my eyes, but whether or not he's going to do that, I'm skeptical."

Spencer, it seems, is entering his paunchy Elvis phase, dressed in a white suit (with black buckled shoes truly deserving of a "What are thooooooose?"), sporting long-ish sideburns, big dumb Ray-Bans, and looking a bit bloated. He is a slightly better talker with cameras in his face, which let him be more oppositional than he is during the actual speech where his speaking style is best described as diet, caffeine-free, Dwight Schrute from "The Office" channeling Mussolini.

"The most radical thing for anyone to say is, 'I am white, my life has meaning, my life has dignity, I am part of a family," he says to the crowd of 100 or so. He adds, as though he's filibustering through an S.A.T. prompt, "Free speech really matters and this is why we are here today."

There is so much bad faith and cognitive dissonance here and the D.C. police are trying to keep everyone separated, not allowing the Nazis to get too close to the D.C. United Against Hate rally a little closer to the Lincoln Memorial ("The rally you want to be at is over there" a cop tells a guy in Trump gear) and moving D.C. United Against Hate attendees, including one woman in a wheelchair, away from the Nazis, a presumably wise decision but also one that offers up a false equivalency between the two groups.

A stronger stance is taken by a Parks and Rec. volunteer who silently leaves three Internet-y Nazis hanging after they want to shake his hand and "thank him for [his] service," they say.

We're all soaking in it out herethe 4chan-ing, Reddit-residing, Pepe meme-ing, racist, anti-semitic, alt-right to which Trump is at least adjacent to or making coy goo-goo eyes at (did you see Eric Trump's got the Nazi haircut now?). That its face, Spencer, has become a meme himself, someone who, when he shows up, bloviates about white supremacy and then often gets bopped in the face or glitter-bombed, which is then GIF'd, makes sense: The internet's demands will always devour youlike the sea it will make you small, take you over, and you will eventually lose to it. Right now, Spencer's virality is shrinking because, it turns out, he's got this horrible sincerity that won't make him lasthe is like Mike Pence or something, someone who actually cares, truly believes his bullshit, whereas it is the "alt-light," Cernovich and Posobiec, who are super cynical like Trump or Mitch McConnell, goofy grandstanders, needling nihilists.

Then, Spencer's speech gets loosely inspirational: "The real challenge is within ourselves, we are the ultimate censors of free speech, we aren't willing to be honest even when we are alone. There is a black cloud that hangs over whites around the world," he says, really going for it here, referring to white guilt. Yes, the black cloud is white guilt.

Today, Spencer's another racist doofus and he is far less entertaining than, say, the internet ding-dong and former Buzzfeed employee who goes by the name Baked Alaska, who gives off Guy Fieri vibes and whose tone is bro-running-for-high-school-class-president.

The culture wars of the early '90s have only recently entered Baked Alaska's radarhis story is he became alienated working at Buzzfeed and was confronted by culturally sensitives millennials so he bemoans "SJWs" and political correctness and tells the crowd they've been blind to what's been going on and it has to end.

"We just deflected it all, we had our hater blockers on and we just didn't pay attention to it and now all of a sudden everyone's getting butthurt, everyone's afraid to be called racist to be called anti-semitic to be called all these names," he says. "And, and I think it's garbage, I think it's absolutely garbage."

Not far away, closer to the Lincoln Memorial, the collection of liberals, folkies, leftists, and peaceniks discuss Richard Collins III, a college student murdered for being black, nod to the deaths that are imminent under Trumpcare, and chant "Nazis out!"

Baked Alaska, well, he's bitching about Twitter suspensionsthe stuff that really matters.

"I actually got suspended from Twitter for a week," he says, noting/boasting it was because he shared a "Gas chamber meme." The audience laughs and cheers (they booed when he mentioned Buzzfeed, though). During his speech, he also makes a joke about being part of "Generation Z"Z here for Zyklon B, the cyanide used during the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, tourists here to see D.C. on a sunny Sunday have no time for the alt-righters. Some confront and debate them and police move them away quickly. One man with his family chuckles, and calls them Nazis, shocked but also unimpressed.

"Yeah, we're Nazis," one teenaged Nazi spits back.

"88," another Nazi yells.

One of them is dressed like a Hitler youthor a bizarre Hot Topic cosplay version, everything about him is slack and clean rather than orderly.

The rally wraps up quickly following Spencer's speech. Identity Evropa members get in formation and leave. One guy from the group smiles and shoots another sieg heil at photographers. Some have helmets on and one keeps fucking with a mouthguard. It seems as though they are on a mission, and at times they pick up the pace to a march-jog along the D.C. sidewalks away from the memorial.

Then they stop at a Metro station escalator, ride it down, and pull out their Metro cards to go home. Safety in numbers, that's all it was. No grand statement or action or confrontation. That's what all of this is: an expression of bewildered fear, an excuse for failure, a way to be a part of something, anything, all hating together.

Their leader, Richard Spencer, didn't join them on the Metro. He jumped into a rental car not long after his speech ended more than an hour ago.

Continue reading here:
Alt-Right in Fat Elvis Mode: 100 or so Nazis gather for Freedom of ... - Baltimore City Paper (blog)

June 28 2017

by Rachel DiCarlo Currie

Everyone agrees that Americas political and cultural debates have become viciously polarized, and everyone has an explanation for how that happened. No explanation is complete unless it mentions the prominent role played by unelected judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular.

For decades now, the judiciary has been declaring that certain hot-button social issues fall outside the boundaries of democratic politics. Indeed, rather than allow the people and their elected representatives to reach some type of compromise on, say, abortion or same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court has chosen to make policy by judicial fiat.

As a result, the losers in Americas culture wars millions and millions of people across the country feel theyve been disenfranchised. Quite understandably, they question the legitimacy of court rulings that have no real basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution or American law.

Alas, the Supreme Courts current swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, has contributed to this erosion of democratic government. Whether Justice Kennedy announces his retirement this year, or next year, or four years from now, cases such as 1992s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court reaffirmed its central holding in Roe v. Wade, and 2015s Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, will be a significant part of his legacy. (Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell and co-authored the plurality opinion in Casey.)

Examining that legacy, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn explains how Kennedy has exacerbated Americas political and cultural divisions:

[start block quote]

What makes issues such as abortion and marriage so contentious is that the opposing moral positions cannot be reconciled. The beauty of democratic politics, however, is its recognition that what free people want and what they will settle for as reasonable are two different things. Justice Kennedys unfortunate legacy on these hot-button issues is to take compromise off the table and thus ensure anger and ill will.

And why not, when the sides are depicted as the enlightened versus the bigots? Though he walked it back in Obergefell, in which he conceded that many who opposed same-sex marriage were acting from honorable religious or philosophical premises, in the 2013 decision overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Kennedy asserted that the only possible motivation for such a law was a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group.

Anthony Kennedy is an educated man who writes in the smooth tones of Stanford and Harvard Law. The effect, alas, is no less noxious. Next time Americas corrosive politics comes up, its worth remembering that the justice so often hailed as a moderate or centrist has done as much as any to fan the flames of Americas raging culture war.

Read the whole thing.

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How the Supreme Court Has Inflamed America's Culture Wars - Independent Women's Forum (blog)

Angela Nagle seems fearless. Who else would dive deep into the Alt-Rights swamp of Pepe the Frog memes, conspiracy theories, and anonymous depravity unified by a hatred of PC culture, feminism, and multiculturalism, and a love for Donald Trump? Her new book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, documented this section of the internet at a time when most on the left dared not lookwhen just mentioning 4chan or Gamergate seemed like an open invitation for a slew of misogynistic and racist hate mail.

Yet after Trumps election, every mainstream news source suddenly had to get an interview with those involved in the new edgy, nihilistic youth subculture dubbed the Alt-Right, a deviation from the right wings conventional National Review bow ties and Evangelical Christian moralizers. Whether covering former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos campus speaking tours or framing white nationalist Richard Spencer as a surprisingly dapper fascist (as if Nazi leaders werent from the suit-wearing elite), the liberal media class came off looking decidedly unprepared to combat the truly horrifying, utterly contradictory ideas this new wave of Alt-Right/Alt-Light espoused.

Kill All Normies provides much-needed context for the violent rise of a fringe internet subculture of mens rights activists and gamers into the public sphere, and it does so without undeservedly praising the liberal left. Instead, the book argues that the materially empty slacktivism and virtue signaling of liberals helped inflame these reactionary politics. She begins with the election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the re-emergence of cyber-utopian visions on the left. An intense fervor of optimism surrounded new technology and social medias leaderless revolutions that would make the world more democratic and better off. But what followed were cycles of momentary outrage, fizzling passions, and mockery as seen in internet campaigns like Kony 2012 and #JusticeForHarambe. The same 4chan poised to lead the anonymous hacktivist tide did wind up making cultural waves, but they came from the far right.

Nothing typifies the culture wars more than late Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbarts statement that [p]olitics is downstream from culture. Though the phrase was popularized by those on the far right, Nagle comes to attach it to the liberal Tumblr view of politics. In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as theyre cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years, she writes. Nagle counters the false dichotomy of the culture wars, and Trump has so far disproven Breitbarts thesis. Material policy comes before culture. The millions of Americans primed to lose their healthcare so some hemophiliac old-money Republican trolls can get a tax cut make Sean Spicer getting called fat by a white nationalist ghoul like Steve Bannon seem pretty trivial.

While Kill All Normies may be a critique of liberal involvement in the culture wars, it is by no means purely cynical. Rather, its a call to organizenot just to #resist Trump, but to dismantle the culture and structures that allowed him to rise in the first place. For the left to move forward in a meaningful way, it must shed the faux pragmatism of centrist-liberal narratives like America Is Already Great. Nagle posits that the only way out for the left is to refocus energy onto improving the material conditions imposed by capitalism on working people. That might take the form of granting all people access to healthcare and education, ending the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the United States, or divesting from imperial proxy-wars in the Middle East. Nagles call is a weighty oneshe asks readers to look beyond the individual actors that the culture wars assign blame to and instead toward the structures built to enable violence. Its a difficult turn, but its one we must take. After all, the Alt-Right cannot be the other option.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle (Zero Books)

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Slouching Toward the Beltway in Kill All Normies - The Portland Mercury