Donald Trump using homophobia for autocracy

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump Campaign CEO Uses Anti-Gay Slur (AUDIO)

3 September 2016

Stephen Bannon has an interesting theory as to why liberals have a problem with conservative women. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

“Donald Trump’s newly appointed campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon has come under fire again, this time for his comments about women.

During a 2011 radio interview, Bannon said that the left hate conservative women like Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin because they aren’t ‘a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools‘.

Bannon, known for his brash tone as the head of Breitbart News, was also embroiled in a 1990s court case in which a coworker accused him of sexual harassment, Buzzfeed reported.”

Read more here [in the British conservative Daily Mail].

By Eric London in the USA:

Embattled Trump plays homophobia card to strengthen his fascistic base

29 July 2017

The Trump administration’s attack on the democratic rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people is the implementation of a reactionary political strategy. It seeks to combine appeals to homophobic hysteria, religious bigotry, the glorification of police and xenophobic American nationalism to encourage the growth of a fascist movement.

Embroiled in perpetual crisis, the Trump administration is attempting to establish a base of political operations centered around the demagogic president and outside the existing structure of the two-party system. By firing former Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff and replacing him with Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Trump has taken another step toward his goal of establishing a personalist executive comprised of a close group of fascists, generals, family relations and billionaire oligarchs.

The pattern of Trump’s maneuvers this week proves the attack on LGBT rights is central to this strategy.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed an advisory “friend of the court” brief in a private New York lawsuit arguing that corporations can fire LGBT people because of their sexual orientation on the pseudo-legal grounds that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect LGBT people. After half a century marked by growing social acceptance and advances in the legal rights of LGBT people, millions of LGBT workers are again at risk of immediate firing because of their second-class legal status.

Earlier on Wednesday, Donald Trump tweeted an announcement that his administration would bar transgender people from military service “in any capacity” on the reactionary grounds that transgender people cost the military too much and because of the “disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

The same day, Trump announced the nomination of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback as the State Department’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom. This move is aimed at bringing the evangelical and Catholic organizations that bankrolled Brownbank’s short-lived 2008 presidential campaign into a bloc with Trump. After the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Brownback issued an executive order prohibiting the state government from suing or punishing churches that refuse to provide marriages and other social services for LGBT people.

White House sources told the Daily Beast that Trump and Bannon are working closely with Vice President Mike Pence, who has the closest ties to the evangelical establishment and who personally orchestrated the transgender ban tweets. According to the unnamed sources, Trump, Pence and Bannon thought that the move would be popular “with his base.” The fact that military advisors said they were not consulted about the tweets confirms the fact that Wednesday’s policy announcements were conceived within the West Wing.

Wednesday’s policy announcements were bookended by two major speeches, the first on Tuesday night in Youngstown, Ohio, which set the political tone for the moves. Paying tribute to “our values, our culture, our borders, our civilization, and our great American way of life,” Trump told a raucous crowd that “family and faith, not government and bureaucracy, are the foundation of our society. In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.” This out of the mouth of a man who has never worshiped anything but money and himself.

Speaking yesterday in Long Island, New York, Trump addressed another of his key constituencies: police and immigration officers. He announced a major escalation of immigration raids to be carried out under the pretext of fighting the El Salvadoran gang MS-13.

“We have blood-stained killing fields,” Trump said, describing in gruesome detail the violent tactics of the gang. Police and immigration officials “are liberating our American towns,” he added, and told officers he loved watching criminal suspects “get thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.” He appealed to the country’s over 1.1 million full-time police officers in the United States, 50,000 border patrol agents, and 20,000 ICE officials: “Please don’t be too nice.”

The official response of the Democratic Party has been remarkably restrained, with criticism limited to arguing that Trump’s transgender ban would weaken the military.

Given the significance of Trump’s attacks, the muted character of the Democratic Party’s response contains a real warning. None of the democratic rights gained over the last century are secure, so long as their enforcement is left in the hands of one or another faction of the ruling class, and are vulnerable to shifts in the political wind.

The Democratic Party has dropped all references to democratic questions like immigration, LGBT rights, or abortion in their new “Better Deal” agenda, announced last week. Defending the new program, Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer told reporters that social issues like the rights of LGBT people or immigrants “won’t be the focus” of the new agenda. “Essentially what we don’t want to do is distract people…we don’t want to distract ourselves.” In other words, Democratic leadership is appealing to social reaction and religious bigotry to win votes in the 2018 midterm elections.

Several Democratic Party leaders have expressed concerns over the “Better Deal’s” failure to mention any democratic or social questions, and many will oppose the Trump administration’s attack on LGBT rights. But the decision to promote a program based on “aggressively cracking down on foreign trade” (as the program states) will only fan the flames of nationalist chauvinism and further strengthen Trump’s maneuvers.

The fight to defend democratic rights is urgent: Trump’s efforts to establish a fascistic movement based on nationalism and religious bigotry threaten the social rights of hundreds of millions of people, not only of immigrants and LGBT people. But to fight political reaction, one must understand its objective roots.

Political reaction draws its strength from a set of economic and social relations that have arisen on the basis of the dramatic expansion of social inequality and wealth concentration under capitalism. After more than 15 years of permanent war fought for the profits of American corporations, the military and intelligence agencies control the elected officials and dictate the policies of the government. Faced with growing social polarization, police are armed with military weapons left over from the wars and have been granted a license to kill by the courts.

Since the growth of the power of the military, police, the churches, and the deportation agencies is the product of the growth of inequality, the fight for democratic rights must be based on the struggle for social equality. Such a struggle must involve the political activation of the working class, the powerful social force which produces all of society’s wealth under capitalism but which is exploited by the capitalists regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Genuine democracy can only be achieved by abolishing capitalism, the system of economic relations that gives rise to political reaction in all its interrelated manifestations. Only on the basis of the unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism can democratic rights be won and preserved.

Law enforcement officials from around the world released a statement in apparent response to President Donald Trump’s speech Friday to cops in New York in which he appeared to encourage police brutality: here.

Trump Justice Department: Corporations can fire employees based on sexual orientation: here.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department launches bid to make being gay a sackable offence: here.

How a Gay Friendly and “Very Pro-Choice” Trump Created the Most Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBT Administration in Generations: here.

THE U.S. REJECTED A U.N. RESOLUTION CONDEMNING THE DEATH PENALTY FOR LGBTQ PEOPLE Saying it’s due to larger concerns about voting against capital punishment. [HuffPost]

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested 114 undocumented immigrants in New York City and the surrounding counties as part of an 11-day police operation that ended Saturday, July 22: here.

USA: Evangelical leaders released an anti-LGBTQ statement on human sexuality.

The trial has begun for a man who allegedly tortured and killed an 8-year-old for being gay.

This longtime neo-Nazi denounced the movement. And then he came out as gay and Jewish.