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Michael Brown

It has been one year since a sniper ambushed 12 Dallas law enforcement officers, killing five, at a police brutality protest on July 7, 2016. Then-President Obama declared at the time, There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement.

Yet violence against law enforcement has become commonplace in recent years. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 66 officers were shot to death in 2016. So far in 2017, 24 more have been shot to death. There were 43 police gunned down in 2015 and 50 in 2014. In each of those years, shootings were the number one cause of death for police officers in the line of duty.

The most recent instance came Wednesday morning, when a New York police officer of 12 years was fatally shot in the head while sitting in a police truck in the Bronx.

One retired St. Louis-area police officer traces all the anti-police animosity back to that violent August 2014 confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri, that ended up costing black teenager Michael Brown his life and spawning a lie The Washington Post would later call one of the biggest Pinocchios of 2015 Hands up, dont shoot!

The invention of this narrative that Michael Brown was shot while he was innocently trying to surrender with his hands up is what brought on the last three years of violence, particularly anti-police violence, Jeff Roorda, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, told WND.

In the days, weeks and months following the Brown shooting, numerous media outlets reported Brown had been shot with his hands held up in surrender, begging Officer Darren Wilson not to shoot him.

However, a Department of Justice investigation into the incident found the Hands up, dont shoot claim was not supported by the evidence. What the DOJ found was the physical and forensic evidence supported Wilsons account of events: Brown reached into Wilsons SUV and grabbed and punched the officer, tried to grab Wilsons gun, and then, in the final moments of his life, charged at Wilson as Wilson shot him.

Its never been tougher to be one of the men in blue than it is right now. Get The War On Police: How the Ferguson Effect Is Making America Unsafe now at the WND Superstore

This DOJ report was released in March 2015. However, some media outlets continued to perpetuate the Hands up, dont shoot line even after the report came out, as the Media Research Center documented. Even as recently as this May, CNN was still treating the Hands up, dont shoot story as if it might be true.

Roorda noted sadly the DOJ report did not defeat the Hands up, dont shoot narrative.

You still read in every mainstream media account where they refer to Ferguson, they say, Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot by a white police officer,' he said. Theyre still not telling the whole story. Theyre still reframing history even though we know thats not what happened.

Roorda believes all the faulty reporting about Hands up, dont shoot, combined with one-sided accounts of many other police encounters, has fueled all the hostility and violence against police that has dominated headlines over the past couple of years.

People are reacting to the narrative, not the reality. If the reality was what was on peoples minds, they wouldnt be ambushing cops. Even the deranged assassins in Baton Rouge, Dallas and now twice in New York, I dont think they would have been driven to such a heinous act if they werent compelled by this false narrative.

For Colin Flaherty, who chronicled nationwide black mob attacks against white people in his book White Girl Bleed A Lot, the Hands up, dont shoot lie is the embodiment of fake news and one of the most glaring lies of the 21st century.

Michael Brown is the most relentless lie of our generation and Hands up, dont shoot is still an idea many people believe that fuels anti-cop resentment, Flaherty told WND in frustration. No matter how often every part of his story is exposed as a lie, people just keep repeating it as if it were truth. Last year, the Washington Post labeled the story of Michael Brown as one of the biggest lies of the year and they gave it four Pinocchios.'

However, Flaherty complained the media, even The Washington Post, still seem to suggest Officer Darren Wilson did something wrong in shooting Brown. An Associated Press article published in The Washington Posts online edition on June 22, 2017, about the Ferguson Police Department referenced the Brown case and took care to mention Brown was black and unarmed. But it did not mention Browns attack on Officer Wilson.

How many cop killings, from the Dallas shooting in July of 2016 or the Baton Rouge shooting of the same timeframe, were fueled by the fake news lie of Hands up, dont shoot? he asked.

Its never been tougher to be one of the men in blue than it is right now. Get The War On Police: How the Ferguson Effect Is Making America Unsafe now at the WND Superstore

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'Hands up, don't shoot' lie fuels violence against cops - WND.com

Photo Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention last year. He has offered different accounts of a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

In less than 24 hours, President Trumps eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has given two different explanations for a meeting he held during the 2016 campaign with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who promised to provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Trumps meeting with that lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was first reported by The New York Times on Saturday. In response, Mr. Trump said the meeting was brief and focused mostly on the issue of adoption.

This was Mr. Trumps statement to the news media on Saturday:

It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.

I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.

The statement made reference to Jared Kushner, President Trumps son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the presidents former campaign manager.

Mr. Trumps version of the meeting changed Sunday, when three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it told The Times that Mr. Trump met Ms. Veselnitskaya after she promised to provide damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Trump acknowledged on Sunday that Ms. Veselnitskaya offered him information on Mrs. Clinton but that her statements made no sense and the information was not meaningful.

This is the statement Mr. Trump gave to the news media on Sunday:

I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign. I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance. We had a meeting in June 2016. After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act. It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting. I interrupted and advised her that my father was not an elected official, but rather a private citizen, and that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office. The meeting lasted approximately 20 to 30 minutes. As it ended, my acquaintance apologized for taking up our time. That was the end of it and there was no further contact or follow-up of any kind. My father knew nothing of the meeting or these events.

An earlier version of this article misquoted a statement by Donald Trump Jr. about a meeting with a Russian lawyer. He said the meeting mostly focused on the topic of adoption, which was not a campaign issue. He did not say it was a campaign issue.

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Donald Trump Jr.'s Two Different Explanations for Russian Meeting - New York Times

BBC News

Donald Trump backtracks on Russia joint cybersecurity unit BBC News Donald Trump has backtracked on a proposal to work with Russia to create an "impenetrable" cybersecurity unit to prevent election hacking. Hours after promoting the idea on Sunday, the US president said that he did not think it could actually happen. Trump on his 'impenetrable' cybersecurity unit with Putin: I didn't mean itCNBC Trump now says Russia-US Cyber Security unit can't happenABC News Donald Trump puts US in a club of oneCNN Washington Times -Gizmodo all 4,874 news articles »

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Donald Trump backtracks on Russia joint cybersecurity unit - BBC News

President Trump drew condemnation for tweeting a violent, doctored video of him punching CNN on July 2, but the real punches were thrown back in 2007, at a scripted WWE match. Here's a look at how the fight came to be. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

If we could rip Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr.out of all political context and speak of them simply as two men with smartphones,their story might be one ofa father and son learning to memetogether.

Witness their accomplishments in the past week.

Step 1. The fatheradvancesan idea:

Step 2. The son follows up:

Of course, thats simplistic; theTrumps memescantbe separated from politics any more than the men.

When Trumptweeted a clip of himself pummeling a CNN avatar a week ago, he did so as president of the United States one who frequently attacksthe press asanenemy.

WhenTrump Jr. spent the following days advancingvariations of his fathers meme culminating in Trump as Tom Cruise chasing CNN in Top Gun he did so as the son of an embattled politician, and one of the presidentsfiercest defenders.

[The Reddit user behind Trumps CNN meme apologized. But #CNNBlackmail is the story taking hold.]

Father and sonhave long beenprolific online. And their week-long WrestleMania-to-Top Gun assault on CNN is not the first time they ganged up ona rival.

You might rememberthe final weeks of the 2016 election, when Trump jumped on his Democratic opponentfor calling his supporters a basket of deplorables.

Wow. Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people, Trump wrote on Twitter, which he had been using for years, favoring thewritten word over GIFs.

I think it will cost her at the Polls! Trump concluded in his tweet in September.

Clintons deplorables labeldid, in fact, turn into a symbolof pride for many Trump fans. Its evolution into a full-blown meme gota strong assist from Trump Jr. a few days after his father tweeted.

That was nearlya year ago, and Trump Jr. claimed ignorance of the imagehed promoted.

Ive never even heard of Pepe the Frog, he told an ABC host who called the cartoon a white supremacist symbol. I thought it was a frog in a wig. I thought it was funny.

But if Trump Jr. was ameme novice then, he would learn much.

So would his father.

[A Reddit user who wrote about stabbing Muslims is claiming credit for Trumps CNN video]

Toward the end of 2016, many reporters began to write about a phenomenon theycalled fake news. As outlets such asPoliticoand NPR reported, thesewere manufactured news articles, originating onshady websites, designed to trick people into sharing fictions as facton social media.

Trump, at least as much as anyone, helped invert the terms meaning at first simply typing FAKE NEWS in all caps when someoneran a story he didnt like, buteventually applying it to virtuallyevery major news outlet in the United States.

And Trump Jr. followed up by extending fake news tohashtag form.

Trump supporters picked up on the trend, too, and inevitably, fake news became one of the political rightsfavorite memes.

Which bring us up to the present day, and the Trumps cooperativememe war onCNN.

No one is quite sure how a clipof Trumppummeling an anthropomorphized news networkat WrestleManiatraveled from Reddit to the presidents Twitter feed last weekend, where Trump adorned it with the hashtag: #FraudNewsCNN.

But travel itdid, and becameone of the presidentsmost popular tweets ever.

It also providedhis son with memetic inspirationfora full week.

A day after Trump tweeted the CNN-Wrestlemania clip, Trump Jr. retweeted one of countless variations that sprang up: CNN as Charlie Brown failingto kick a football held by Trump as Lucy.

Trump Jr. also went back tothe ancient hold-my-beer meme, retweeting an updated version that mocked CNN.

And he repeatedly tweeted the #CNNBlackmail hashtag accusingthe network of coercing an apology out of the Reddit user who created the WrestleMania meme.

A meme about a meme, yes.Trump Jr. had learned much sincehis first forayinto the world of Pepe the Frog.

Then, on Saturday, he shared one of the best Ive seen.

Best memes, that is. It was his fathers face pasted over Tom Cruises fighter pilotin the climactic scene of Top GunTrump chasing a CNN logopasted onwhat in the movie was aRussian-made MiG jet.

There may have been some unintended irony in Trump Jr.s selection. The same day, theNew York Times reportedthat he had met with a lawyer tied to the Kremlin during his fathers campaign.

But never mind. Trump and Trump Jr.have both downplayed investigations into the campaigns possible collusion withRussian hackers as fake news.

In thelatest iteration of the intergenerationalcycle ofmemes, the fatherblasts CNN out of the sky, and the sonshares it with the world.

More reading:

A Reddit user who wrote about stabbing Muslims is claiming credit for Trumps CNN video

We are not fake news: At a Trump-free correspondents dinner, White House press has its say.

From old photo to right-wing meme to Trumps twitter: The journey of one Schumer/Putin pic

See more here:
Donald Trump Jr. loyally prosecutes his father's meme war on CNN - Washington Post

Trump spoke in Warsaw but could not make time to visit the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Photo: Celestino Arce/NurPhoto via Getty Images

President Donald Trumps visit to Warsaw prior to the G20 summit in Hamburg was a whirlwind affair, tightly scheduled and lasting less than a day. It was so tight, in fact, that he was unable to squeeze in a stop at the monument to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, sending his daughter Ivanka to lay flowers there instead.

With that decision, Trump became the first U.S. president in nearly 30 years not to pay his respects at the monument on his first state visit to Poland. Leaders of the Jewish community there expressed disappointment in his decision to skip it.

Coming just days after the president retweeted a video of himself beating up CNN from an account that turns out to have also trafficked in vicious anti-Semitism (once again), the omission was bound to draw notice and criticism from Jews in Poland as well as the U.S. It was also suspiciously convenient to the political agenda of Polands ruling party, Politicos Annie Karni notes, as the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party has worked to refocus Polands historical memory of the Holocaust on its Polish victims and heroes (of which there were indeed very many) and away from the virtual eradication of the countrys millennium-old Jewish community much less any Polish complicity in that atrocity, the mere mention of which the ruling party has sought to criminalize.

This is not to suggest that Trumps travel itineraries reveal anti-Semitic intentions. But its part of a pattern of participating in situations and categories of political rhetoric with anti-Jewish undercurrents.

In his Warsaw speech, Trump referred frequently to the West and to our civilization, going so far as to state grandiosely: The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. This claim, Peter Beinart observes at The Atlantic, only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia:

The south and east only threaten the Wests survival if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the Wests survival if by West you mean white, Christian hegemony. [ ] So when Trump says being Western is the essence of Americas identity, hes in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. Hes not speaking as the president of the entire United States. Hes speaking as the head of a tribe.

What makes this language particularly notable in this context is that the crowd Polands government bussed in to cheer Trump on may have an even more circumscribed view of who does and does not belong in the West. While the Law and Justice Party is not overtly anti-Semitic, the same cannot be said for all of its supporters, and its perspective on history betrays a certain resentment of the prominence given to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust. Bolstered by the governments right-wing populism and xenophobia, anti-Semitism has come into vogue again in the home of Auschwitz and Sobibor in recent years, just as it has in other European countries.

Hungarys right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, for instance, may insist that his latest campaign of posters depicting George Soros as a sinister caricature of the laughing Jew is just about Soros, the individual but its not convincing. Not incidentally, the Orban and Trump administrations are disturbingly friendly. Orban welcomed Trumps inauguration as the end of multilateralism and has praised Trumps heavy-handed approach to controlling immigration; Trumps Islamophobic counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka was also once an advisor to Orban.

Trump may be drawn to European nationalists like Orban by nothing more than their shared suspicion of Islam, but he is apparently blind to the anti-Semitism that tends to co-exist with that variety of Islamophobia.

In the same vein, he either doesnt understand or doesnt care that his diatribes against liberal internationalism and his attacks on the press have origins in old school anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and serve as dog whistles to Jew-haters, even as his supporters repurpose the Nazi slur lugenpresse and alt-righters gleefully tweet about an impending journocaust. To be sure, the new anti-Semitism is by no means exclusive to the right just ask those G20 protesters in Hamburg what they think of Jews. But its no accident that anti-Semitic incidents spiked 86 percent in the first few months of the Trump administration, as the alt-right celebrated what they saw as their victory.

Yet whether out of ego, ignorance, or cognitive dissonance, Trump is unwilling or unable to grapple with the possibility that he might be enabling that spike. Indeed, he seems not to even understand the connection. That makes him no less unsettling.

Hes been holding dinners for donors and other influential GOP figures at his home on the grounds of the Naval Observatory.

The president reversed himself after the idea was panned by both Democrats and Republicans.

The presidents son says he was lured into the June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer under false pretenses.

Plague, famine, heat no human can survive. This is not science fiction but what scientists, when theyre not being cautious, fear could be our future.

Why does the president double-down every time it seems like he should retreat? Because Bannon is still his chief tactician.

There is no sign that the power-plant control systems were affected by the breaches.

It seems more than likely that Trump has just shrugged off Russias attack on last years presidential election, including to Putin himself.

Donald Trump Jr. arranged the previously undisclosed June 2016 meeting, which President Trumps lawyers are now suggesting was a setup.

If she werent my daughter it would be so much easier for her, the president also explained on Saturday.

A dirty little secret of GOP health policy is conservatives desire for a 1950s-style system with high out-of-pocket costs and limited insurance.

The nine nations that possess nuclear weapons did not participate in the treaty negotiations.

Congressman Mike Conaways family bought stock in UnitedHealth the same day that a bill repealing Obamacares taxes on insurers advanced in committee.

A viral moment from the G20 summit.

An op-ed co-authored by Clinton strategist Mark Penn tells Democrats to emulate a 1996 strategy the actual candidates did not pursue.

The First Lady was sent in to interrupt them during the G20 summit.

One Democrat in Trenton wants to make sure Beachgate stays in the news.

Rioters mixed with peaceful protesters as world leaders gathered in the German city.

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The Anti-Semitism Around Donald Trump - New York Magazine