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The oath keepers, a big part to play in claiming to respond to Trumps call to watch the election, and cause violent protests if biden wins

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When heavily armed militiamen and federal law enforcement had a tense standoff in Nevada in 2014, members of a far-right group called the Oath Keepers showed up, weapons in hand, to lend support to the militiamen. They also showed up - again, heavily armed - in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015 during protests set off by the one-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014.

Now, just days before Election Day, the group has issued a "call to action" asking its members to station themselves at polling places across the country to "help prevent criminal vote fraud and attempted criminal voter intimidation on election day."

The Oath Keepers profess to be a nonpartisan organization, but their warnings about voter fraud directly echo the words of Donald Trump, who has spent weeks asserting - without any evidence - that the election will be rigged.

"I hear these horror shows, and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us," Trump said in October to a nearly all-white crowd in northeast Pennsylvania. "And everybody knows what I'm talking about."

Trump's incendiary rhetoric has sparked widespread fears that Election Day could be marred by confrontations between Democratic voters and Trump loyalists. And unlike many of the fringe extremist groups that have said they'll answer Trump's call, the Oath Keepers - made up mostly of current and former US military, police, and first responders - are actually likely to be out in force, right on the front lines on Election Day.

The group is calling on members and supporters around the country to "form up incognito intelligence gathering and crime spotting teams and go out into public on election day ... to look for and document suspected criminal vote fraud or intimidation activities, by any individuals, groups, or parties, and then report those incidents to your local police."

But even though the group's leaders have explicitly instructed members to be unarmed, obey the law, blend in, and not make any attempt at intimidation, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who hears the call to action will follow those rules.

"The concern is that a lot of Oath Keepers supporters are not the kind of people who are going to sit there and take a picture of illegal activity instead of confronting someone," explains Sam Jackson, a PhD candidate at Syracuse University who studies the Oath Keepers. "So while what the national leadership is calling for is relatively reasonable, the followers might take that and run with it, and do what they want."

And that's scary. Because unlike some other groups that have issued similar calls in recent days, experts believe the Oath Keepers actually have the ability to mobilize supporters in significant numbers. Though the Oath Keepers claim to have tens of thousands of members, the Anti-Defamation League believes their actual numbers to be far smaller, at just a few thousand. That still makes them one of the largest anti‐government extremist groups in the US.

So who are these guys? What do they believe? And what, exactly, are they planning to do at the polls on Election Day?

The Oath Keepers really, really distrust the federal government

The group was founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a former US Army paratrooper and Yale Law graduate who spent some time working for Ron Paul. They describe themselves as "a non-partisan association" whose members "pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to 'defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'"

In a rather bizarre series of exchanges, Rhodes declined to be interviewed for this story, because in his words, Vox "is obviously, and clearly biased to a degree that borders on the comical." He said that if I sent him a draft of the article, he would be happy to "point out the many inaccuracies and false-associations with racists that I am sure will be in there. But that will only really help me make a case for a later lawsuit when you nonetheless libel us."

However, after I wrote him back assuring him that I only wanted to portray his group fairly and accurately, he finally agreed to a phone interview and gave me his home phone number. When I called, he answered but asked me to call him back in a few hours. He didn't answer when I called back, and as of time of publication, has not responded to the voice message I left him with my phone number or the multiple emails I sent afterward.

If Rhodes had been willing to be talk, he might have explained the group's well-publicized history of showing up heavily armed at various anti-government protests and confrontations with law enforcement around the country.

Oath Keepers joined the 2014 standoff at the Cliven Bundy Ranch in Nevada and also traveled to Ferguson in August 2015, ostensibly to protect local residents and businesses from looting and rioting and defend black protesters' right to bear arms.

More recently, Oath Keepers showed up for the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a militia group led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy earlier this year, though the Oath Keepers say they were there merely to "keep the peace" between the occupiers and law enforcement, not to participate in the actual takeover of the wildlife refuge.

Oath Keepers also stood guard at military recruitment centers after the deadly shootings at two such facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July 2015 that killed four Marines and a Navy sailor and injured two others.

The group has a list of 10 "Orders We Will Not Obey," which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "a compendium of much-feared but entirely imaginary threats from the government." Many of them track closely with the kinds of conspiracy theories peddled by radio host and Trump supporter Alex Jones and some of the other alt-right groups backing the GOP nominee:

1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people .

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a "state of emergency" on a state.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on US soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control."

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

To most people, explicitly and formally vowing never to obey orders like these may seem a little, well, unnecessary, as the chances of ever receiving such orders in the first place are essentially nil. To most people, that is - but not to those who believe in one of the longest-running paranoid fantasies of the far right.

The conspiracy theory fueling the rise of the Oath Keepers

The Oath Keepers' belief system is shaped by the notion that the world has been secretly taken over by a global socialist cabal called the New World Order.

Adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that the leadership of the United States, regardless of political party, is secretly working to bring New World Order rule to America. To prevent this from happening, true American patriots must be ever vigilant for any sign that the takeover is beginning. (The Oath Keepers motto is "Not on our watch!")

"They believe the United States is the last bastion of freedom in the world, but that our own government is actually collaborating with the New World Order to strip away our rights and freedoms, starting with the right to keep and bear arms," says Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, who has been studying right-wing extremists since the mid-1990s.

"And once we lose that right,'' he adds, ''we won't be able to defend ourselves anymore. And once we're rendered defenseless, the New World Order will sweep in and enslave us like it's enslaved the rest of the world."

This central belief is accompanied by a number of "subsidiary" beliefs, including what Pitcavage terms "the unholy trinity of militia conspiracy theories":

1. The US government has set up hundreds of concentration camps and at any minute could start rounding up Americans.

2. The government is going to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution, perhaps using a pretext such as a fabricated terrorist attack or a fabricated pandemic.

3. The government is going to engage in door-to-door gun confiscation in order to disarm the country and pave the way for the New World Order takeover.

This set of beliefs, which makes up the core of the militia movement's ideology, helps explain the Oath Keepers' seemingly bizarre list of 10 "Orders We Will Not Obey."

Okay, so they're anti-government. Are they also white supremacists?

The extreme right in the United States today is dominated by two broad movements: the neo-Nazi/white supremacist movement, which includes groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, and the anti-government "patriot" or militia movement.

The Oath Keepers are part of the militia movement, not the white supremacist movement. The focus of their fury is the federal government - racial hatred and anti-Semitism are not part of the group's ideology.

In fact, Rhodes himself is of Hispanic descent, and he speaks with pride about the fact that his family on his mother's side were Mexican migrant farmworkers. And although the majority of the members are white, the Oath Keepers does have African-American members.

Further, the organization's bylaws state that "No person who advocates, or has been or is a member, or associated with, any organization, formal or informal, that advocates discrimination, violence, or hatred toward any person based upon their race, nationality, creed, or color, shall be entitled to be a member or associate member."

However, the group has at times expressed views that are hostile to Islam and Muslims - though it is not always overt. For instance, in one article on the Oath Keepers blog, Rhodes writes, "We of course support the sincere moderate Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, author of Radical: My Journey out of Extreme Islam, that condemn these acts of terror and are attempting to reform Islam from the inside."

Yet in that same post, Rhodes directs readers to what he calls "an excellent piece" by Matthew Bracken, which discusses the "persistent virulence of Mohammed's 7th Century plan for global domination" and describes Islam as "a brushfire or ringworm infection: it is dead and barren within the ring, but flares up where it parasitically feeds off the healthy non-Islamic societies around it."

The Oath Keepers aren't pro-Trump. They're just super anti-Clinton.

The group maintains that it's nonpartisan, and that its only goal in monitoring the election is "to counter actions of any political party or criminal gang that attempts to disenfranchise the citizens of our nation."

Yet at the same time, the group has made its anti-Clinton leanings abundantly clear, characterizing her as the presidential candidate of "the globalist establishment" (a term the group uses interchangeably with "New World Order"). Indeed, Rhodes once wrote an article back in 2008 depicting a future dystopia in which "Herr Hitlery" becomes president and, "[d]ressed in her favorite Chairman Mao signature pantsuit," proceeds to disarm the American people and turn the country into a totalitarian police state.

So how can they claim to be nonpartisan? It comes down to how you define "nonpartisan." "They are 'nonpartisan' in the sense that they're willing to criticize people from both parties that they consider 'statists' or 'globalists' or 'traitors to the Constitution' - basically anyone who violates what they think of as 'individual liberty' or 'natural rights,'" explains Syracuse's Jackson.

So it's not that they love Trump - in fact, they're not entirely sure they can trust him - it's that they really, really hate Clinton and want to keep her from winning.

"Rhodes has made it crystal clear that what his interest is is in Democratic voting fraud," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "He's not interested in or suspicious of Republican voting fraud. This is essentially an anti-Clinton project."
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The Oath Keepers, the far-right group answering Trump's call to watch the polls, explained

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When heavily armed militiamen and federal law enforcement had a tense standoff in Nevada in 2014, members of a far-right group called the Oath Keepers showed up, weapons in hand, to lend support to the militiamen.

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An article expressing the "divide" and how and why a tie is more likely

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In U.S. presidential elections, it's rare that the race is so close that the nation goes to bed on election night not knowing who won. Yet that's what America woke up to on the day after-a contest between Democrat Joe Biden and incumbent Republican President Donald Trump that remains too close to call, even with a record-shattering voter turnout.

Votes are still being counted, but in an unprecedented election night declaration, Trump claimed victory in the wee hours and called for vote-counting to halt as he made allegations of fraud despite lack of evidence. The vote-counting continues, as it does in every election, as absentee and mail-in ballots are tallied. Amid the pandemic, a record-breaking number of these ballots were used to vote this year.

"No president in history has ever stood up on election night and declared himself the winner and attempted to call off the vote count," says Eric Alterman, a historian and writer who teaches at Brooklyn College in New York.

Modern polarization

The 2020 race is the third presidential election of the last six that's gone down to the wire. In the end, the winning margin in the Electoral College may not be close. Or, the 2020 election could displace the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore as the most contentious election of the group.

"Given the polarization of our electorate today, we're never going to see a 60 percent landslide or a 20 percent margin in the popular vote," says Bruce Schulman, an American history professor at Boston University. Americans are just so closely divided along party lines that wide margins of victory are becoming rarer.

The outcome of the Bush-Gore race remained unresolved for more than a month after Election Day. Ballot irregularities-including the famed " hanging chads "-prompted a recount in several Florida counties and set in motion a series of lawsuits, with appeals up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On December 12, the high court ordered the recount to end. Bush led Gore in the Florida count by 537 votes and thus won the state's 25 electoral votes. It was enough to give him a narrow victory in the Electoral College-271 votes to Gore's 266-even though Gore had won the popular vote nationwide by more than 500,000 ballots.

In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes, but carried the Electoral College with 304 votes to Clinton's 227. Trump eked out a victory by narrowly winning three Rust Belt states-Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania-by less than one percent of the vote in each. Combining vote totals in all three states, he bested Clinton by fewer than 80,000 votes. Clinton lost Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes. In all, nearly 139 million votes were cast nationally.

In 2020, the race will be decided once again in those Rust Belt states. But the 2020 election stands out because pundits had predicted two opposing scenarios right up to Election Day-it could be either a landslide or very close. In the case of a close election, the pundits also foresaw legal combat that could arise out of Trump's repeated claims of fraud that date to his first campaign in 2016.

During that campaign, then-candidate Trump regularly raised questions about potential election rigging. And during his first week in office in 2017, Alterman notes the president asserted, without evidence, that three million non-citizen immigrants had voted illegally, and set up a commission to search for voter fraud. No fraud was found and the commission was disbanded. Voter fraud in the United States has occurred in isolated and infrequent instances; multiple investigations have never substantiated claims of widespread cheating.

Voter fraud "is vanishingly rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to that necessary to 'rig' an election," writes Justin Levitt, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. In a 2007 analysis, the center found incident rates of between .0003 and .0025 percent, meaning a voter had a higher likelihood of being struck by lightning, or by a car on the way to the polling place.

Still, as this election approached, Trump suggested at rallies that some version of fraud could exist in mail-in and absentee ballots. He also declared that voting should stop on election day, and Republican lawyers went into court in several states, including Pennsylvania, where they unsuccessfully argued that ballots arriving after election day not be counted. The Supreme Court allowed state officials to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after the election.

That runup set the stage for post-election chaos in swing states with large numbers of mail-in and absentee ballots that could stretch on for weeks.

Historical nail-biters

In modern presidential elections, the closest popular vote tally remains the 1960 racebetween Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, who was then serving as vice president to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Neither man claimed a majority of the vote; Kennedy won 49.7 percent, and Nixon won 49.5 percent, separated by fewer than 113,000 votes. (Kennedy carried the race with 303 electoral votes, far outstripping Nixon's 219; the remaining electors supported Harry Byrd, a segregationist Democrat senator from Virginia who was also on the ballot.)

The race was won in Texas and Illinois-for different reasons. Kennedy's running mate Lyndon B. Johnson helped secure his home state of Texas, while Chicago Mayor Richard Daley turned out enough Democratic voters in Cook County to offset southern Illinois where Nixon ran ahead. Republicans later claimed that Daley stole Cook County, in what has since become one of the most enduring, if unproven, allegations of widespread election shenanigans. The myth goes, Schulman says, that "all Cook County residents, living and dead, voted early and often."

In fact, the demographics of Cook County were favorable to the Democrat. "You don't need fraud to explain how Kennedy got the numbers that he did," writes Paul von Hippel, a public policy and data science professor at the University of Texas, in The Washington Post.

Yet the fact is, Schulman says, that a shift in votes by less than one percent in Texas or Illinois "could have made a difference."

One of the closest elections that rarely gets mentioned is the cliff-hanger in 1880 between Republican James Garfield and Democrat Winfield Hancock. Although Garfield won 214 electoral votes to Hancock's 155, Garfield only defeated Hancock in the popular vote by 7,368 votes-one of the smallest margins ever recorded.

"If you look at the Electoral College, it seems like a pretty decisive victory," Schulman says. "But he won less than one-tenth of one percent of the popular vote."

Close elections don't get much stranger than the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated incumbent President John Adams, but tied with his own running mate, Aaron Burr, since presidents and vice presidents were not listed separately on the ballot at the time. The tie forced the election into the House of Representatives, where neither man won on the first 35 ballots. After negotiations convinced several Federalist congressmen to switch their allegiances from Burr, Jefferson won on the 36th ballot.

The election of 1876 also was decided by the House of Representatives when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes ran against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. The campaign was deeply divisive in ways not seen in national elections of that era. Tilden won the popular vote, but 19 Electoral College votes were in dispute, leading to allegations of fraud. Congress set up a commission to determine the winner. Just two days before the inauguration was to be held, Hayes was declared the winner by a single vote on the 36th ballot.

A big reminder of the perils of announcing close elections came in 1948, when President Harry Truman was predicted to lose. Truman, who had succeeded President Franklin D. Roosevelt after he died in office, faced a strong challenge from Thomas Dewey, a Republican governor from New York. On election night, the Chicago Daily Tribune declared Dewey the winner in what the Tribune still refers to as the most famous wrong call in electoral history: A massive headline that declared, "Dewey Defeats Truman."

It was yet another election in which neither candidate won 50 percent of the vote. Truman tallied 49.6 percent to Dewey's 45.1 percent, with the remaining 2.4 percent going to a spoiler candidate, Strom Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina who ran as a "Dixiecrat." Truman carried the Electoral College by a wide margin-303 to Dewey's 189 and Thurmond's 39. But it is that black-and-white photograph of him, wearing a broad grin and holding up the Tribune's front page, that lives on in infamy. To this day, it serves as the best caution to modern prognosticators: Don't get ahead of the final count.

Editor's note: Erin Blakemore contributed to this piece.

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Why 'close-call' presidential elections are happening more often

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In U.S. presidential elections, it's rare that the race is so close that the nation goes to bed on election night not knowing who won. Yet that's what America woke up to on the day after-a contest between Democrat Joe Biden and incumbent Republican President Donald Trump that remains too close to call, even with a record-shattering voter turnout.

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What would be an incredible article, but the abstract very nicely manages to describe the state of Trump's presidency

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With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy and the state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women's reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives need to develop a more unified notion of the political in order to overcome the splintering nature of single issue movements, and that it is important to develop a broad-based social and political formation based on the promise of a radical democracy to come.

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White nationalism, armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump - Henry A. Giroux, 2017

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With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics.

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A few notable comments regarding comparison to protests vs Obama's presidency

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Today, thousands of people assembled in streets around the world to protest the presidency of Donald J. Trump for the fourth straight day in a row.

While the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful, spurts of violence have drawn the attention of the media. Reports of protesters throwing rocks and bottles at police in Santa Ana , stories of property destruction in Oregon , and a video of a physical attack against a Trump supporter in Chicago are a few examples of the recorded violent reactions to Trump's election.

President-elect Trump responded to the demonstrations by tweeting:

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Trump's supporters also perceive these protests as "unfair" because they claim there were no riots following Obama's election.

According to conservatives on social media, "Republicans have jobs and responsibilities" and therefore couldn't engage in civil disobedience to voice their discontent with the 2008 and 2012 elections. With this perception of the Obama elections and subsequent claims of " Republican acceptance," Trump supporters are now demanding the same "fairness" for Donald J. Trump's presidency, "We sat through do nothing politics for 8 years, the least they can do is go shut up and sit in the corner for 8 themselves," on Trump supporter explained.

However, these perceptions do not reflect what actually followed the election of our country's first black president, much less the difference between why people are protesting Donald J. Trump's presidency as compared to Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama Jill Biden to advocate for debt-free community college as next first lady Biden's secret weapon, should he choose to use it: Bill Clinton Focus on cabinet nominees' effectiveness and expertise, not just ideology MORE 's presidency.

Obama's election in 2008 was preceded and followed by violent attacks and property destruction targeted against minorities.

Kaylon Johnson, an African American campaign worker for Obama, was physically assaulted for wearing an Obama T-shirt in Louisiana following the 2008 election . The three white male attackers shouted "Fuck Obama!" and "Nigger president!" as they broke Johnson's nose and fractured his eye-socket, requiring surgery.

More frequently, Obama's presidency was marked by effigies of our first black president hanging from nooses across the country, for example in Kentucky, Washington State, and Maine , or being burned around the world. What Trump supporters fail to remember is that following Obama's election, property was destroyed across the country, for example in Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina, and a predominately black church was torched in Massachusetts .

In 2008, anti-Obama protesters lashed out against minorities because of their discontentment with a black man being voted into the office of president for the first time in our nation's history. Conversely, in 2016, anti-Trump protesters are holding mostly peaceful demonstrations because of their discontentment with a man, who has ostracized minorities, being voted into the office of president.

And while anti-Trump protesters have engaged in mostly peaceful demonstrations against the president-elect, pro-Trump supporters have been responsible for a wave of attacks against Muslims, Latinos, blacks, and the LGBT community.

According to Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center civil rights group, there haven't been "such a rash of hate crimes in the United States since Barack Obama was elected America's first black president in 2008." Muslim women are reporting having their hijabs ripped from their heads, while immigrant children are being bullied. Trump's name and slogan, "Make America Great Again," are being found alongside swastikas and anti-minority messages in graffiti around the nation.

Ultimately, demonstrators are not protesting Trump because he is Republican. They aren't protesting him because he is a white male. These protests are because of the bigotry his campaign has emboldened and the fear of discrimination his presidency has the capacity to perpetuate.

Mehlman-Orozco holds a Ph.D. in criminology, law and society from George Mason University, with an expertise in human trafficking. She currently serves as a human trafficking expert witness for criminal cases and her book, "Hidden in Plain Sight: America's Slaves of the New Millennium." Follow her on Twitter

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Conservatives forget history in discrediting Trump protesters

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Today, thousands of people assembled in streets around the world to protest the presidency of Donald J. Trump for the fourth straight day in a row. While the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful, spurts of violence have drawn the attention of the media.

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Really interesting collection of data regarding violent attacks / direct links to Trump

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Dozens of supporters of Donald Trump have carried out or threatened acts of violence. Here, the Guardian lists them all

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-Violation of human rights/ black lives matter
-Election fraud
-People's trust in trump
-Violent protests
-The Artifact

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We spoke to the author and academic Shoshana Zuboff who has written extensively about how big tech is out of control and has undermined democracy across the world. I started by asking for her reaction to our investigation

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Voters being targeted in 'information warfare', says Shoshana Zuboff

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We spoke to the author and academic Shoshana Zuboff who has written extensively about how big tech is out of control and has undermined democracy across the world. I started by asking for her reaction to our investigation

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Potentially discuss the toxic masculinity and how it's influenced his fans and trump

His position alone was enough to spark contraversey

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Trump had a massive impact BEFORE entering politics too, because of his ammassed fame from businesses and TV, which probably helped to have a bigger impact

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"being in power" limited my research to January 2017 an onwards, when it started quite early on, since announcing he wanted to build the mexican border wall

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IT ISN'T ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump's shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety - despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

Consider Bernie Sanders, de facto leader of the #Resistance. "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks," he said at a rally in Boston on Friday, alongside fellow progressive senator Elizabeth Warren. "I don't agree." Writing in the New York Times three days after the election last November, the senator from Vermont claimed Trump voters were "expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own".

Warren agrees with him. "There were millions of people across this country who voted for [Trump] not because of his bigotry, but in spite of that bigotry" because the system is "not working for them economically," the Massachusetts senator told MSNBC last year.

Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isn't surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. It's difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as " racial resentment." The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Facts, however, as a rather more illustrious predecessor of President Trump once remarked, "are stubborn things." Interestingly, on the very same day that Sanders offered his evidence-free defense of Trump voters in Boston, the latest data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) was released.

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that "whether it's good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump's appeal." For example, he says, "in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment."

The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask "just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?" Because, he said, "if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton." This is economic anxiety? Really?

Other surveys and polls of Trump voters found "a strong relationship between anti-black attitudes and support for Trump"; Trump supporters being " more likely to describe African Americans as 'criminal,' 'unintelligent,' 'lazy' and 'violent'"; more likely to believe " people of color are taking white jobs"; and a "majority" of them rating blacks "as less evolved than whites." Sorry, but how can any of these prejudices be blamed on free trade or low wages?

For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isn't there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasn't everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that "income predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump." Their conclusion? "Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics."

Their view is backed by a detailed Gallup analysis of interviews with a whopping 125,000 Americans, which found that Trump supporters, far from being the "left behind" or the losers of globalization, "earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration." The "bottom line" for Gallup's senior economist Jonathan Rothwell? "Trump's popularity cannot be neatly linked to economic hardship."

Look, if you still believe that Trump's appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as "the most important issue facing the country" opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didn't black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?

To be clear, no one is saying there weren't any legitimate economic grievances in Trumpland, nor is anyone claiming that the economy played no role whatsoever. The point, however, is that it wasn't the major motivating factor for most Trump voters - or, at least, that's what we learn when we bother to study those voters. Race trumped economics.

Defenders of the economy narrative have a "gotcha" question of their own: how can racial resentment have motivated Trump supporters when so many of them voted for Barack Obama, across the Rust Belt, in 2008 and 2012? "They're not racists," filmmaker Michael Moore passionately argued last November. "They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein."

Klinkner, though, gives short shrift to this argument. First, he tells me, "most of them didn't vote for Obama. There weren't many vote switchers between 2012 and 2016." Second, "working class whites shifted to Trump less because they were working class than because they were white." Klinkner points out that in 2016, Clinton, unlike Obama, faced a Republican candidate who "pushed the buttons of race and nativism in open and explicit ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney were unwilling or unable to do."

If Democrats are going to have any chance of winning back the White House in 2020, they have to understand why they lost in 2016, and that understanding has to be based on facts and figures, however inconvenient or awkward. The Sanders/Warren/Moore wing of the party is right to focus on fair trade and income equality; the calls for higher wages and better regulation are morally and economically correct. What they are not, however, is some sort of silver bullet to solve the issue of racism. As the University of California's Michael Tesler, author of "Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era," has pointed out, the "evidence suggests that racial resentment is driving economic anxiety, not the other way around."

Always remember: You have to identify the disease before you can begin work on a cure. In the case of support for Donald Trump, the results are in: It isn't the economy. It's the racism, stupid.

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Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues

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IT ISN'T ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump's shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety - despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

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Trump supporter tells man in racist rant that she hates him because he's Mexican

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Examining Racist Nativist Microagressions on DACAmented College Students in the TrumpEra

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Examining Racist Nativist Microagressions on DACAmented College Students in the TrumpEra

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An article discussing the racist intentions of trump in regards to lantinx students

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worldwide, nationwide, poltical, ratial.

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"To what extent has Donald Trump influenced a violent nationwide divide since entering politics?"

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Potential topics of discussion
-Trumps influence of a nationwide divide
-Overall influence a political leader has over followers
-dangers of believeing everything someone says
-subjective view of oppression
-trumps influence on violent protests
-trumps ability to lie his way to the public
-politicians lying
-Trump refusing to concede the election despite losing the popular vote and the press called the state with 99%

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Trump's opinions had a major effect recently with his claims regarding covid. In a time when the virus was reaching it's second peak and killing thousanda daily, it lead to anti mask protesters (considered very dangerous) having their way. The ignorance has lead to voilence and once again divide.

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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1325194709443080192

Trumps entire twitter account FULL of useful information in regards to his influence

Could mention his tweets flagged by Twitter

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Electoral Fraud or Violence: The Effect of Observerson Party Manipulation Strategies

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Electoral Fraud or Violence: The Effect of Observerson Party Manipulation Strategies

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An article regarding how election fraud can be committed, and way's it's prevented

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Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 

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Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 

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An article written a year before the election, prediciting the outcome

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In advance of the 2020 election, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas prepares readers for a less-than-peaceful transition of power.
It doesn't require a strong imagination to get a sense of the mayhem Trump will unleash if he loses a closely contested election. It is no less disturbing to imagine Trump still insisting that he is the rightful leader of the nation. With millions of diehard supporters firmly believing that their revered president has been toppled by malignant forces of the Deep State, Trump could remain a force of constitutional chaos for years to come. WILL TRUMP GO? addresses such questions as:
How might Trump engineer his refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat? What legal and extra-legal paths could he pursue in mobilizing a challenge to the electoral outcome?

What legal, political, institutional, and popular mechanisms can be used to stop him?

What would be the fallout of a failure to remove him from office? What would be the fallout of a successful effort to unseat him? Can our democracy snap back from Trump? Trump himself has essentially told the nation he will never accept electoral defeat. A book that prepares us for Trump's refusal to concede, then, is hardly speculative; it is a necessary precaution against a coming crisis.

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In advance of the 2020 election, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas prepares readers for a less-than-peaceful transition of power. It doesn't require a strong imagination to get a sense of the mayhem Trump will unleash if he loses a closely contested election.

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https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/america-votes/explaining-stop-the-steal-trump-supporters-viral-offensive-to-discredit-the-election-1.5177864

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https://apnews.com/article/trump-supporters-refuse-to-accept-defeat-cc7e4298261cb6b2254507cea6e98ac9

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-Images of his supporters
-Examples of his tweets
-Examples of his supporters tweets
-Specific banners from his supporters
-Interview clips
-Debate footage

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If you find a popular article, look up the journalist that wrote it, to see what else they wrote.

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We ask a question to a popular search engine (typically google) and we look at the first few results that pop up. If we don't understand the source or want different information we usually move on to the next one. If it's still not good enoug h we look up different search terms.

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Bristol statue of Edward Colston was brought down by members of the public in anger, regarding the fact that its a statue of a big  slave trader.

London also had a statue of Robertt Milligan which was vandalized with black lives matter, before being removed in response to the community (which was a response to the public removal in bristol)

Could do some image / object anaylsis on the statues and what they represent.

Arguments for not taking the statues down, to defend national cultural memories (such as Winston Churchill)
The narratives are built up and may differ from person to person depending on their experiences.

"these statues finction as idealised forms of whiteness and as [art of the infrastrucute of racial dominance"

"Rhodes must fall" movement against confederate statues. He layed a dominant role in south africa, and played a role in dividing the races. Seen as a massive racist.

Taking the statues down is a way of helping to indicate change within culture. Statues are a part of a representation of the past, or "cultural memory"

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Very wide variety
-statues
-films
-memes
-photos
-banners in protests

basically try to link how a cultural artifact links to some form of power and resistance

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When there is power, there is resistant

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I have payed close attention to UK and british politcs in the last few years, and there are some infuriating things over the years. Trump for example, most of what he has done is infuriating to me, but it's his ability to create a mass following which in one way or another consisted of just under half  of america. A large chunk of the voters known as "trump supporters" have admitted in interviews that they will do anything he says without providing any reasonable explanation.

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Could discuss the rules of the corona virus pandemic and how the government has managed to dodge the rules, which has led to a disobedient society

Rules are in place with the intention of keeping their interests at bests, and to make the most money possible. (keeping specific things open)