Yeah, the Republicans tried to make a circus of it, but in the end some important information was put on the public record that made their attempts laughable.
WASHINGTON, DC – A congressional hearing on hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism was held by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, coincidentally on the 121st anniversary of the birth of noted entertainer and activist Paul Robeson. While there were little answers to be revealed in the end, panelists were able to provide information about today’s rampant climate of hate politics and violence, from data to historical information to experience and in regards to the conservatives invited to testify, real time examples by default.
In his opening remarks, Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) noted how violent activities committed by white supremacists in the nation have transpired at an alarming rate in recent years, which he referred to as an “urgent crisis”, and not only have they not been taken seriously by the Trump Administration, but also that the Administration seems to give an allowance to the activities and rhetoric that fosters such incidents to take place. “Unfortunately, a time when decisive leadership is needed, the President’s rhetoric fans the flames with language that intentional or not, motivate white supremacist movements,” he said, citing as an example how Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the alleged shooter in the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings last month that killed 50 people, was a supporter of Donald Trump as “an example of white identity and common purpose,” which refers to what was in a manifesto reportedly authored by Tarrant.
He also took issue with the inactivity of Congress to this concern, recalling how the Democrats, when they were in the minority, attempted to hold this kind of hearing in the wake of the tragic “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville Virginia over two years ago that resulted in the death of counter protester and after the mass shooting of 11 persons at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, but were stonewalled by the majority Republican House. “Congress in recent years, has also failed to take serious the threat the white nationalism the hate crimes pose,” he said. “Last congress, we did not even hold here relating after the Charlottesville white rally or the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. Now we see witnesses invited by the minority who openly associate with hate.”
The last remark was in reference to Morton Klein of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America and Candace Owens of Turning Point USA. While Klein is Jewish and Owens is Black, both have a history of either courting White Nationalism, making bigoted remarks or taking controversial stances. Klein has defended a proposed policy of then-candidate Trump’s to profile Muslims. “In an era in which the vast majority of terrorism is committed by Muslims, in order to protect American citizens, we should adopt the same profiling policies as Israel and be more thorough in vetting Muslims,” he said while Trump was running for president.
Curiously, at this hearing he was dismissive of the concern for White Nationalist violence, and repeatedly laid blame for such violence at the feet of leftists and Muslims, even at one point saying that Tarrant actually hated Trump and was on the left, despite his writings suggesting otherwise. He received groans and boos from hearing attendees when he dismissed violence and harassment on the right altogether on college campuses. “During the decades we have been combating anti-Semitism, we have never seen a single complaint about the discrimination harassment or intimidation by the neo-nazis or white supremacists,” he said. “By contrast we have seen calls about the discrimination and intimidation perpetrated by the left-wing significantly Muslim hate group Students for Justice and its allies.”
In February, a new report noted that hate incidents were on the rise in college campuses with White supremacist literature proliferating there and racist slurs and messages written in dormitories and public places. The Federal Bureau of Investigation noted that said in November that nearly 280 hate crimes had been reported to the agency by campus police forces in 2017, an uptick from 257 in 2016 and 194 reports in 2015. There has not been any impartial entity that has implicated the pro-Palestinian Students for Justice in any hate crimes or incidents, although right-wing circles routinely use the organization as a strawman for grievances they file against Muslims in general. Later in the day, Rep. Lou Correa noted that he was visited by the family of Black Army 2nd Lt. Richard Collins, a University of Bowie student who was murdered in 2017 on the University of Maryland campus allegedly by former UMD student Sean Urbanski, who had online connections to “alt-right” chat rooms and Facebook groups. Urbanski is slated to face trial on July 22 – ironically the 8th anniversary of the Oslo shootings committed by neo-Fascist terrorist Anders Breivik who killed 77 people.
Owens received a lot of attention in the hearing, most notably from the Republicans on the Committee who were attempting to make the argument that conservatives have been victimized as well, using her as an example. Owens testified that she has been targeted by left-wingers for her conservative views and stances, noting in particular an incident in Philadelphia where she says she was accosted, called names and had water thrown on her by whom she termed as “antifa”. Like Klein, much of her time was spent attempting to paint her personal opposition as the real culprits in hate crimes, using conservative propaganda items such as referencing the Ku Klux Klan as a Democratic organization, ignoring that the Klan considers themselves to be a conservative organization, repeatedly using the race card suggesting that attacks on her is because she is Black and a conservative, and odd declarations that the attempt to get right-thinking voters to abandon the Democratic Party and join Republicans in the sixties – often referred to as the Southern Strategy – never happened, despite the Republican strategists from the late Lee Atwater to current Trump advisor Roger Stone saying otherwise in the past.
Owens was the more controversial witness on the panel because of her direct connections to the White supremacists they were concerned about, including Brenton Tarrant, who said in his manifesto that she was inspired by him, a point later made by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Owens got her start running the website and YouTube channel “Red Pill Black”, “red pill” being a reference from the movie the Matrix that White supremacists have adopted as a term to describe their transition into White supremacist or neo-Fascist ideals. She was called on her flirtation with neo-Fascism when Rep. Ted Lieu played remarks from her at a December 2018 Turning Point event that have generated controversy where she made remarks about Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler that many saw as apologist. “Whenever we say “nationalism”, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler,” she said. “You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.”
“In congressional hearings, the minority gets to pick their own witnesses, and of all the people the Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens,” Rep. Lieu said before asking Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Senior Vice President for Policy Eileen Hershenov about how such rhetoric feeds into the White supremacist ideology. When Owens was allowed to make remarks to counter his, she began by again playing the race card saying, “it is apparent he thinks Black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety.” Chairman Nadler immediately gaveled her down and admonishing her for disparaging a member of the Committee, and when she was allowed to continue she attempted to double down on those past remarks as she has done in the past, saying that they were in response to a question she was asked at that event. (Rep. Lieu) is trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany when in fact the question that was asked of me was pertaining to whether or not I believe in nationalism and that nationalism is bad, and what I responded to was that I do not believe that we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist,” Owens explained, saying further that Hitler should not be considered a nationalist because “a nationalist would not kill their own people”. Hitler however, considered those he killed in the Holocaust, most notably the Jewish population of Germany, as enemies of the German people, not of them.
The Republican members of the Committee focused primarily on what they saw was hate directed at conservatives and antisemitism, the latter serving as a vehicle to denounce as hate speech Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of American supporters of Israel.
Despite the witnesses Republicans presented, the hearing was able to put on record a number of issues, most notably the impact social media outlets have had on combatting hate elements in today’s society. Neil Potts the Public Policy Director of Facebook said that the platform does not tolerate racism and fascism, noting that they remove such content, as did Alexandria Walden, the counsel for free expression and human rights at Google. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) pushed back on that, asking Potts why neo-Fascist commentator Faith Goldy remained on the Facebook platform, even while the social network was announcing a ban on White nationalism. “What specific proactive steps is Facebook taking to identify other leaders like Faith Goldy and preemptively remove them from the platform?” Cicilline asked. To which Potts reiterated that the company is working to identify those with links to hate and violence, such as Goldy, who he said was removed on Monday.
Chairman Nadler meanwhile noted a online Washington Post article about the hearing that indicated that as the hearing streamed live on YouTube, which is owned by Google, a live chat alongside the video included racist and vitriolic statements by users. While Nadler said that it illustrated part of the problem they faced, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) attempted to dismiss the live chat as a “hate hoax” and asked the Chairman to “just keep an open mind”. YouTube disabled the live chat.
Eileen Hershenov noted a new Anti-Defamation League report released just that morning that documented, in the wake of the shootings in Pittsburgh and New Zealand, how fringe social networking sites “act as echo chambers for the most virulent anti-Semitism and racism, and act as active recruiting grounds for potential terrorists.” In addition, she testified that 78 percent of all extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018 were committed by white supremacists. “(T)here is a crucial need for this hearing, focusing on white nationalism– not because other types of extremism aren’t dangerous, but because we as a society, our laws, and our elected leaders have not focused sufficiently on the rising threat of white supremacy,” she said.
To that end, Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was particularly critical of the FBI diverting efforts from such threats to investigate so-called “Black identity extremists,” which critics have said has been an attempt to distract attention from the reality of police abuse against people of color. “Corrosive white supremacist movements are tearing away at the fabric of our nation, and without question, they are using online platforms to recruit new members, activate followers, target communities, organize rallies, stream their murders and incite violence,” she said. Meanwhile, Eva Paterson testified to the history of White supremacist violence that targeted people of color as well as of faith in this country. “White supremacy is alive and well,” she said. “We want the Congress to take bipartisan action to denounce it…We are hopeful that a majority of you will want to give the country a signal that we are “One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
Before she began her remarks, Paterson asked for a moment of silence for those killed by hate violence. Her remarks followed that of Dr. Mohammad Abu Salah, who lost his daughters Yusor and Razan and his son-in-law and Yusor’s husband Deah Barakat four years ago in Chapel Hill, NC when Craig Hicks allegedly went to a neighbor’s condo and shot all three, killing them. Hicks, who is still awaiting trial, maintains he was not motivated by hate, but Salah and others have disputed this. “We miss our children so much,” Abu-Salah said as pictures of his daughter and son-in-law were shown in the chamber. “At times, the pain is just as sharp now as when they died, and I ask you, I truly plead to you, not to let another American family go through this because our government would not act to protect all Americans. Please remember then — Deah, Yusor and Razan — they are my children and they are gone.”
Committee members also paid tribute to victims of hate violence. Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) noted James Byrd a Black man who was dragged behind a truck in Jasper, TX in June 1998, and Matthew Shepard a gay man who was beaten to death in Colorado four months later. Sylvia Garcia held back tears speaking about 16-year-old Latino hate crime victim David Ritcheson who in April 2007 testified to the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee about passing more stringent hate crime laws after he was beaten, tortured, and sexual assaulted by two White youths who even tried to carve a swastika into his chest. Three months later, he committed suicide. The two who assaulted him are currently in prison. Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), who is best known as the mother of Jordan Davis who was shot and killed by a White man who claimed he was standing his ground when he actually instigated a situation because the radio in the car Davis was in was too loud, read a statement from two survivors of the Tree of Life synagogue urging the Committee to take action to prevent such acts from happening again. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) spoke also of James Byrd but also held up a picture of one of the three churches that had been torched in the past ten days in St. Landry Parish, a small community about an hour west of Baton Rouge. When talking about her transition into right wing politics, Candace Owens insultingly dismissed Rep. Jackson-Lee’s concerns, saying, “When I became educated about the issues and stopped reacting emotionally, which is what the left wants us to do presumably when they hold up pictures of burning churches, I began to examine the facts and look at some of the narratives they were spinning.” These remarks came just two days before a White supremacist son of a St. Landry Parish sheriff deputy named Holden Matthews was arrested for burning the churches.
The audience that was watching the hearing in the room was comprised mostly of persons of color, most notably those in Muslim garb. A group from the anti-racist Western States Center, who provided testimony that was added into the record by Rep. Jayapal, were in attendance wearing white T-shirts with the names of those killed by hate violence printed on them, and Code Pink members briefly held a sign denouncing Owens for her remarks about Hitler. There were no incidents or arrests.
In the wake of the hearing, Political Research Associates released a report detailing White House ties to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim circles.
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