DAMN!! How will HISTORY look back on Trump, Fox News & all his supporters during Coronavirus & AFTER he leaves office? UPDATE: Trump WON

[playahaitian]

Trump pressured Pence to engineer a coup, then put the VP in danger, source says
By Jim Acosta, CNN

Updated 6:06 PM ET, Thu January 7, 2021



(CNN)President Donald Trump and top White House officials did little to check in on Vice President Mike Pence while he and members of his family were inside the US Capitol when Trump-backed rioters stormed the halls of Congress on Wednesday, a source close to the vice president tells CNN.
Pence was joined by his wife Karen Pence, daughter Charlotte and brother, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, for the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes in Congress Wednesday. Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming "where's Mike Pence," the source said, frightening the vice president and his family.

Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.
"Was he concerned at all that an angry mob that he commanded to march on the Capitol might injure the vice president or his family?" the source asked.


The White House did not respond on the record to a CNN request for comment.

People close to the vice president now believe he is being set up as a "scapegoat" to shoulder the blame inside Trump-world after Pence refused to buckle to the President's demands to engineer a procedural coup that would keep Trump in power.

On Tuesday, Pence came under intense pressure from Trump to toss out the election results during a meeting that lasted hours in the Oval Office. The vice president's chief of staff, Marc Short, was banned by Trump from entering the West Wing, the source said, as the President repeatedly warned with "thinly veiled threats" to Pence that he would suffer major political consequences if he refused to cooperate.


"The message was pretty clear," the source said.

The events Wednesday have left some aides to the vice president feeling Pence was betrayed by Trump as well as White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the President's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

"Rudy, Meadows and their teams have been trying to set up the vice president to take the fall as opposed to admitting they laid out false hope in all of this," the source said.

"Trump just can't admit defeat and wants a scapegoat," the source added.

On Thursday, Charlotte Pence Bond, the vice president's daughter who had been at the US Capitol with him, tweeted her congratulations to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

Derrick Evans, West Virginia lawmaker who stormed the Capitol, announces resignation



Evans, who was charged in federal court in connection with the insurrection that took place at the US Capitol in Wednesday, has resigned from the state's House of Delegates. Evans released a statement that read, in part: “I take full responsibility for my actions, and deeply regret any hurt, pain or embarrassment I may have caused my family, friends, constituents and fellow West Virginians."

https://twitter.com/i/events/1348026817748160513

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

Twitter bans Trump, says plans for Jan. 17 armed protests are circulating

It's a step Twitter has resisted taking for all of Trump's presidency.

www.cnbc.com

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

These Black Capitol Police Officers Describe Fighting Off "Racist-Ass Terrorists"

Two Black officers told BuzzFeed News that their chief and other upper management left them totally unprepared and were nowhere to be found on the day.

www.buzzfeednews.com

These Black Capitol Police Officers Describe Fighting Off "Racist-Ass Terrorists"
Two Black officers told BuzzFeed News that their chief and other upper management left them totally unprepared and were nowhere to be found on the day.
Emmanuel FeltonBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on January 9, 2021, at 4:32 p.m. ET

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Tear gas is released into a crowd of protesters during clashes with Capitol police on Jan. 6, 2021.

The first glimpse of the deadly tragedy that was about to unfold came at 9 a.m. on the morning of the insurrection for one Black veteran of the US Capitol Police. But it didn’t come from his superiors — instead the officer had to rely on a screenshot from Instagram sent to him by a friend.
“I found out what they were planning when a friend of mine screenshot me an Instagram story from the Proud Boys saying, ‘We’re breaching the Capitol today, guys. I hope y’all ready.’” The officer, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from his superiors, told BuzzFeed News that it was just a sign of the chaos that was to come, which saw officers regularly finding themselves unprepared and then outmanned and overpowered by the mob.


The officer said that while the department’s upper management had been telling them to prepare for Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol like they would for any other protest, that Instagram post sent a clear message: this wasn’t going to be just some kind of free speech protest — this was going to be a fight.
Management’s inaction left Black police officers especially vulnerable to a mob that had been whipped up by President Donald Trump, a man who has a record of inspiring racist vigilantes to action. One of the most defining videos of that day was of one of their colleagues, another Black officer, trying in vain to hold back the tide of rioters who had broken into the building and were hunting for Congressional members.
BuzzFeed News spoke to two Black officers who described a harrowing day in which they were forced to endure racist abuse — including repeatedly being called the n-word — as they tried to do their job of protecting the Capitol building, and by extension the very functioning of American democracy. The officers said they were wrong-footed, fighting off an invading force that their managers had downplayed and not prepared them for. They had all been issued gas masks, for example, but management didn’t tell them to bring them in on the day. Capitol Police did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment about the allegations made by officers.




While some of the images from that day appeared to show officers standing by to let the mob into the Capitol building, the veteran officer said that they had fought them off for two hours before the attackers eventually gained access. The officer said that many of the widely spread images of smiling marauders, wandering the halls dressed in absurd costumes, had the effect of downplaying how well prepared some of the rioters were to overtake the building, and even to capture and kill Congress members.

“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” said the officer, who has been with the department for more than a decade. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs ... They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military,” the officer said, referring to two suspected pipe bombs that were found outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

The officer even described coming face-to-face with police officers from across the country in the mob. He said some of them flashed their badges, telling him to let them through, and trying to explain that this was all part of a movement that was supposed to help.

“You have the nerve to be holding a Blue Lives Matter flag, and you are out there fucking us up,” he told one group of protesters he encountered inside the Capitol. “[One guy] pulled out his badge and he said, ‘We’re doing this for you.’ Another guy had his badge. So I was like, ‘Well, you gotta be kidding.’”


Another officer, a newer recruit, echoed these sentiments, saying that where he was on the steps to the Rotunda on the east side of the Capitol, he was engaged in hand-to-hand battles trying to fight the attackers off. But he said they were outnumbered 10 to 1, and described extraordinary scenes in which protesters holding Blue Lives Matter flags launched themselves at police officers.

“We were telling them to back up and get away and stop, and they’re telling us they are on our side, and they’re doing this for us, and they’re saying this as I’m getting punched in my face by one of them … That happened to a lot of us. We were getting pepper-sprayed in the face by those protesters — I'm not going to even call them protesters — by those domestic terrorists,” said the officer.

While it was a hard day for almost every officer at the Capitol, Black officers were in a particularly difficult position, he said, and he drew a stark contrast with how police handled the Black Lives Matter protests this summer.

“There’s quite a big difference when the Black Lives Matter protests come up to the Capitol,” he said. “[On Wednesday], some officers were catering to the rioters.”

He said that what upset him the most was when he later saw images of a white colleague taking a selfie with the attackers, seeming to enjoy his time with the insurrectionists who were roaming the US Capitol with Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacy.


“That one hurt me the most because I was on the other side of the Capitol getting my ass kicked,” he said.

He is certain that if a group of Black Americans had stormed the Capitol, they wouldn’t have gotten that kind of friendly reception from his white colleagues.

“If you’re going to treat a group of demonstrators for Black Lives Matters one way, then you should treat this group the same goddamn way. With this group you were being kind and nice and letting them walk back out. Some of them got arrested but a lot of them didn’t. Everyone who came into that Capitol should have been arrested regardless if they didn’t take anything.”

The number of arrests has steadily increased in recent days, but it currently seems unlikely that everyone who breached the building on Wednesday will be arrested for their actions.

Five people died on Wednesday, including a Capitol Police officer. One protester was shot and killed by Capitol Police, while three others died of medical emergencies during the attack.

The older Black officer didn’t think it was a simple case of treating the rioters differently from BLM protesters, but instead part of a bigger issue with how the agency is managed.

“Our chief was nowhere to be found, I didn’t hear him on the radio. One of our other deputy chiefs was not there,” he said. “You don’t think it’s all hands on deck?”


The veteran officer welcomed the resignation of US Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, but he thinks more needs to change at the agency, which answers to Congress and where security is not as tight as it should be.

“Congress can bring anybody in the building that they want. They can go outside and find 200 people, and say, 'Hey, they’re with me. Come on in.' They don’t have to go through security as long as a congressman said so,” he explained. “They just want to make Congress happy. So I think the next chief needs to come in and sit down with Congress.”

At the end of the night, after the crowds had been dispersed and Congress got back to the business of certifying president-elect Joe Biden’s victory, the veteran officer was overwhelmed with emotion, and broke down in the Rotunda.

“I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face,” he said. “I said, ‘What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I’m so sick and tired of this shit.’”

Soon he was screaming, so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues, could hear what he had just gone through.

“These are racist-ass terrorists,” he yelled out.

In the seven years since Black Lives Matter has become a rallying cry, the image of a white cop deciding how and when to enforce law and order has become ubiquitous. On Wednesday, Americans saw something different, as Black officers tried to do the same, as they attempted to protect the very heart of American democracy. And instead of being honored by the supporters of a man who likes to call himself the “law and order” president, Black Capitol officers found themselves under attack.

“I got called a ****** 15 times today,” the veteran officer shouted in the Rotunda to no one in particular. “Trump did this and we got all of these fucking people in our department that voted for him. How the fuck can you support him?”

“I cried for about 15 minutes and I just let it out.”

 

[playahaitian]

 

[playahaitian]

FBI memo warns law enforcement across U.S. of possible armed protests at 50 state Capitols
The FBI also says an armed group has threatened to travel to Washington and stage an uprising if Congress removes Trump from office.
Members of the National Guard walk through the rotunda of the Capitol on Jan. 11, 2021.Stefani Reynolds / Getty Images


Jan. 11, 2021, 2:07 PM EST
By Tom Winter and Andrew Blankstein
The FBI has sent a memo to law enforcement agencies across the country warning of possible armed protests at all 50 state Capitols starting Jan. 16, and also says an armed group has threatened to travel to Washington, D.C., the same day and stage an uprising if Congress removes President Donald Trump from office, according to a senior law enforcement official.
The memo includes information provided by the ATF, DEA, Defense Department, Park Police, and the U.S. Marshals, among other agencies, according to the official. Some of the information came from social media, some from open source, and some from other sources of information.

The memo was first reported by ABC News.
Related
POLITICS
Right-wing extremists vow to return to Washington for Joe Biden's inauguration
The senior law enforcement official says the FBI’s National Crisis Coordination Center distributed the update to law enforcement agencies as a summary of threat information they’ve received following last Wednesday’s deadly mob attack on the Capitol.
While the memo discusses possible threats discussed by online actors for Jan. 16 through the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, it doesn’t mean that law enforcement agencies expect violent mass protests or confrontations in every state.
For instance, a spokesperson for the FBI in Boston says, “At this point in time, the FBI Boston Division is not in possession of any intelligence indicating any planned, armed protests at the four state capitals in our area of responsibility. (ME, MA, NH, and RI) from January 17-20, 2021.”


Capitol riot ‘more sinister and dangerous’ as time goes on
JAN. 11, 202102:32

The spokesperson added, “As always, we are in constant communication with our law enforcement partners and will share any actionable intelligence.”
According to the memo, the armed group that has discussed traveling to Washington on Jan. 16 said there would be a huge uprising if Congress tries to remove Trump via the 25th Amendment. Law enforcement officials point out that Congress can’t remove a president via the 25th Amendment.

 

[SamSneed]

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Where

 

[playahaitian]

Where

took me a minute but he is being beaten to death with the flag fists and foot stamps

 

[Dannyblueyes]

The way that history will judge Trump and his followers depends on the actions we take today.

If we shut him down and make sure this never happens again history will judge them harshly.

If we don't then history will judge the rest of us harshly

 

[SamSneed]

took me a minute but he is being beaten to death with the flag fists and foot stamps

steps or entrance

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

Bill Belichick declines Presidential Medal of Freedom
Posted by Mike Florio on January 11, 2021, 8:24 PM EST


Getty Images
A man known for making great coaching decisions has made a great one away from the football field.

Patriots coach Bill Belichick has decided to decline the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Recently, I was offered the opportunity to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I was flattered by out of respect for what the honor represents and admiration for past recipients,” Belichick said in a statement issued Monday night. “Subsequently, the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.

“Above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation’s value, freedom and democracy. I know I also represent my family and the New England Patriots football team. One of the most rewarding things in my professional career took place in 2020 when, through the great leadership within our team, conversations about social justice, equality and human rights moved to the forefront and became actions. Continuing those efforts while remaining true to the people, team and country I love outweigh the benefit of any individual award.”

The carefully crafted statement, including among other things deft use of the passive voice regarding Belichick’s decision to punt on the award, makes a very important point without directly saying it. Belichick now believes that the man he openly supported for the office of the presidency in 2016 has behaved in a way that cannot be reconciled with notions of social justice, equality, and human rights. Thus, Belichick cannot reconcile accepting a significant individual honor with his obligations to his family and his football team.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Sometimes, that pen cuts deepest when its blade is perceived as being dull.

Patriots fans support Belichick’s decision to decline Medal of Freedom from President Trump

New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick has decided not to accept the Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump.

www.wwlp.com

 

[playahaitian]

Who has turned down Presidential Medal of Freedom? Question brings surprising answers, including Jackie Kennedy
Updated 8:54 AM; Today 8:54 AM
President John Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961. President Lyndon Johnson reportedly wanted to give the Medal of Freedom to both Kennedys shortly after JFK's assassination.
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By Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel asked Twitter a straightforward question on Tuesday: “Before Belichick, who was the last person to turn down a Medal of Freedom?”
Bill Belichick, for those who don’t follow football, is the longtime New England Patriots head coach. The six-time Super Bowl champion said in a statement Monday that following “the tragic events of last week … the decision has been made not to move forward with the award. Above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation’s values, freedom and democracy.”

The coach clearly is referring to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. The rioters had been urged by the president and other Republican leaders to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over Trump.



So who was the last person to turn down a Presidential Medal of Freedom?


Many of Weigel’s social-media followers took up the question, but as it turns out, a definitive answer isn’t all that easy to nail down. Wikipedia, the internet’s heavily trafficked collaborative encyclopedia, insists Belichick is the first person to refuse the medal. Yet the New York Times wrote in 2015 that President Lyndon Johnson wanted to honor President John F. Kennedy posthumously, along with his widow Jacqueline Kennedy, but that Jackie “declined the medal” for herself.


The reason? Jackie apparently didn’t think much of her husband’s successor. She did not attend Johnson’s second inauguration in January 1965 or the White House Rose Garden dedication in her honor. Wrote author Christopher Andersen in the biography “Jackie After Jack”: “For the remainder of the Johnson administration, Jackie received an official invitation to every state dinner and scores of other White House functions. No longer hiding the fact that she considered LBJ a coarse usurper, she did not bother to answer a single one.”


Then there was Major League Baseball catcher Moe Berg.



This time the source is the Washington Post, which, in an article last year pegged to the release of a documentary about Berg, pointed out that the ballplayer was a spy for the U.S. in the 1930s and ’40s. Among his accomplishments during World War II:


“Berg was eventually handed the seemingly impossible task of finding Antonio Ferri, an Italian aerodynamics expert who had gone into hiding and had been privy to the secret workings of German scientists connected to the Nazi nuclear program. Berg found him and -- because the former ballplayer spoke passable Italian -- helped translate a cache of hidden documents.”

The newspaper adds: “He was awarded a presidential Medal of Freedom in 1945 but refused to accept it. He never explained why ….” The Baseball Hall of Fame states that Berg’s sister “claimed the award” after her brother died in 1972 and donated it to the baseball museum in Cooperstown, New York.


The Medal of Freedom was originally given out for notable civilian service during World War II. President Kennedy later reimagined the medal as a broader honor, to be presented to people who the president determined had advanced national security, world peace or achieved “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

 

[playahaitian]

Opinion: Annika Sorenstam, Gary Player shame golf by accepting Medal of Freedom from Trump

A day after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player accepted the Medal of Freedom in seclusion at the White House.

www.usatoday.com

Opinion: Annika Sorenstam, Gary Player shame golf by accepting Medal of Freedom from Trump
Christine Brennan
USA TODAY




On Wednesday, President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to never accept defeat, then watched as hundreds of them stormed the U.S. Capitol and rampaged through the halls of Congress, later saying, “We love you, you’re very special” to those involved in the deadly and appalling attack.

On Thursday, Hall of Fame golfers Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player stood with Trump at the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They likely were the first outsiders to be with Trump at the White House since the reprehensible violence just 16 blocks away.

Sorenstam and Player, widely regarded as paragons of sportsmanship and honor in their game, did not cancel on Trump. They did not note the horror that had taken place on his watch and decide that Thursday wasn’t an appropriate time to celebrate with him at the White House. They did not care about the gravity of the situation, about the calls from political leaders to remove Trump by impeachment or the 25th Amendment.
No. They willingly chose to accept an award from Trump and be seen with him a day after his words and actions launched one of the most shameful incidents in U.S. history.

There will be those who say Sorenstam, who was born in Sweden, and Player, from South Africa, can choose to accept an award from Trump whenever they wish. That is true. What’s more, Sorenstam was an ardent supporter of Trump’s failed re-election bid, retweeting Jack Nicklaus’ multi-paragraph endorsement of Trump in the days before the 2020 election.

But Sorenstam and Player don’t just represent themselves. They represent all of golf, a mostly lily-white sport that has struggled for decades, to its continuing detriment, to attract women and people of color – just as Trump, a creature of the game, has denigrated those very same people.


As representatives of their game, and as business people who benefit greatly from it, their reputations are sullied, forever. Sorenstam and Player now will be attached to Trump at this horrible time in our nation’s history, forever. They will be known as the people who had the chance to gracefully suggest another day might be better to celebrate golfers in this nation – golfers, for heaven’s sake – and they refused to do so.

They had nothing to do with the insurrection of the Trump mob on Wednesday, of course, but they happily became Trump’s Thursday accessories. They celebrated with him as our nation mourns what he has wrought.

A third golfer, the late Babe Didrikson Zaharias, also was honored by Trump. This is just a guess, but it’s hard to believe the strong, legendary, groundbreaking Babe would have allowed herself to have anything to do with that awful man.



While Player, 85, who once supported his nation’s racist policy of apartheid before later denouncing it, is an understandable Trump ally, Sorenstam’s involvement with Trump is perplexing. She is one of the greatest women to ever play the game. Now 50, Sorenstam is known as a trailblazer for playing in a men’s PGA Tour event, the Colonial, in 2003, enduring sexist taunts from a couple of male players while drawing huge crowds and acquitting herself quite well before missing the cut.

When she retweeted Nicklaus’ endorsement of Trump, I texted her a question:

“How do you reconcile Trump’s awful record on women – bragging and joking about sexually assaulting women ("Access Hollywood" tape), calling the Democratic VP nominee a 'monster,' being accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment by at least 26 women, etc. – while being a woman who has forged an amazing career around the issues of inclusion for women and treating women equally and fairly and with respect?”
She never replied. On Thursday afternoon, I texted again, this time to say I’d like to talk to her about accepting the Medal of Freedom a day after the awful rampage of Trump supporters at the Capitol. She did not reply.

It turns out that the ceremony for Sorenstam and Player was not open to the press. There were no photos immediately available. The event was basically held in secret.

Actually, it was held in shame.

 

[Mrfreddygoodbud]

THey gonna do what they always do, take OUR history

and give us their fuck ups..

Notice nobody is talking about the EIGHTY PERCENT

MOORISH AMERICAN VOTE that was against trump

we should be getting MAJOR props... like when trump

WON the presidency they was shoving those voting

demographics down our throat..

Lets not forget over eighty percent of cacs

wanted him in office..

so we can OFFICIALLY say the Moorish race

is far superior when it comes to being politically astute.

Why are they not mentioning how as a voting block

we were over whelmingly right about both bushs and now trump...


but if cacs are gonna tell history, they are going to be

the ones that were the victims....

so chea,

I expect some serious historical reconstruction like

they always do..

so STAND up True American, Moorish American my great people.

We were right again...!

and Again hold on to your hats we aint seen nothing yet....

 

[playahaitian]

Fans Rip WFT QB Taylor Heinicke After Finding Out He’s a Trump Supporter

After playing a pretty fantastic game against Tom Brady's Bucs, Taylor Heinicke's political views came under scrutiny after surfacing online.

www.complex.com

Fans Rip WFT QB Taylor Heinicke After Finding Out He’s a Trump Supporter
BYDANIEL BARNA
Jan 10, 2021

Image via Getty/Mitchell Layton

The Washington Football Team wasn't given much of a chance against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during Saturday night's NFC wild-card game. That was especially true with the unproven Taylor Heinicke under center.

The 27-year-old quarterback was playing in place of the injured Alex Smith, and while he wasn't able to lead his team to victory, he performed a lot better than people expected. One play in particular—in which he evaded a sack and stretched out into the end zone for a touchdown—turned heads.







The excerpts you see above originated from an August 2020 piece examining Heinicke's long history of supporting Trump, and his questionable stance on the protests over social injustice that swept the nation last year. Once people online caught wind of Heinicke's particular views, the honeymoon for some, was over.

 

[playahaitian]

Gary Player gets top award despite apartheid role
The legendary golfer who helped prop up the apartheid regime will be awarded a prestigious prize by a president who has been accused of being a white supremacist and has made racist statements.

• By: Lloyd Gedye

18 Mar 2020

• Sport

2 April 2014: Gary Player salutes the gallery on the ninth green of the Par Three Contest prior to the start of the 2014 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, in the United States. (Photograph by Harry How/ Getty Images)
South African golfer Gary Player and Swedish golfer Annika Sörenstam will become the first international athletes to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House, where United States President Donald Trump will present them with their awards on 23 March.

Player had an extremely successful golfing career, but a number of books published in the 1980s shine a light on the role he played in the 1970s as a global ambassador for the apartheid regime. This brings into question the appropriateness of Trump’s decision to recognise Player with a prestigious award that is given “to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the security or national interests of America, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavours”, according to the White House website.

Player’s relationship with the US president goes back a number of years. In 2014, Player joined Trump for a ribbon-cutting event at the Gary Player Villa, part of the renovation of the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort. At the time, Trump said, “I have been a longtime fan of Gary and am thrilled to honour him with our first villa dedication and celebrate his legendary career”.


Player is one of only five golfers to have won the career Grand Slam. He won 24 titles on the professional PGA Tour and 19 on the senior PGA Tour Champions during his career, with nine Major titles and nine senior Major titles.

Trump, by then the president of the US, took to Twitter in 2017 to wish Player happy birthday, calling him “a truly great champion and person”. The admiration appeared to be mutual. In an interview with publisher Media24 that same year, Player said of Trump, “He’s trying to bring back the disciplines that America used to have, I’m very impressed”.

Trump and Player teamed up in September last year to play a round at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Their opponents on the day were Sörenstam and Republican senator Lindsey Graham.

Support for segregation
In his 1966 book Grand Slam Golf, Player wrote at the age of 30, “I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid”. He later declared that “a good deal of nonsense is talked of and indeed thought about ‘segregation’, segregation of one kind or another is practised everywhere in the world”.

Player describes South Africa as “a nation which is the result of an African graft on European stock and which is the product of its instinct to maintain civilised values and standards among the alien barbarians”. He goes on to write about black South Africans with the vocabulary of a white supremacist, espousing the colonial framework of the uncivilised natives and the civilised Christian settlers.


In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several activist groups began to protest against Player’s participation in golf tournaments because of his support for the apartheid regime. However, in a 2014 article from the South China Morning Post newspaper, Player simplified these protests against him as being “because he was South African” rather than because of his views and support for apartheid.

“For years they wanted to kill me,” he told the Hong Kong newspaper. “I lost the 1969 PGA Championship to Raymond Floyd at Dayton Ohio – they threw ice in my eyes, they charged me on the green, they threw telephone books in my back when I was swinging, and they screamed at me when I had a short putt. I lost the PGA title by one shot. Those are the conditions I had to play golf under – no golfers played under the same conditions I had to endure.”

Fighting the apartheid sports boycott
Player’s 1966 book makes it clear that he was in complete support of segregation. By the early 1970s, he had graduated to allowing the National Party government’s information department to use him to hide behind.

Former National Party propagandist Les de Villiers details the setting up of the Committee for Fairness in Sport (CFS) in his book Secret Information, published in 1980. The story begins with the Springbok rugby tour to New Zealand of 1973, which was facing the very real prospect of being cancelled amid intense pressure from anti-racism groups.

De Villiers was tasked with drafting an advertisement to counter the sports boycott movement.

When he discussed the draft advert with his boss, then secretary of information Eschel Rhoodie, they decided to set up a front through which to place it in New Zealand and British newspapers. The idea was that the department could then use this front to distribute all sporting propaganda. Former sports writer Gert Wolmarans ran the CFS and former rugby administrator and businessman Louis Luyt was its chairperson.


De Villiers writes that the advert was a big success abroad, but there was “speculation” in the South African media about who was funding the CFS. “Within days, [Wolmarans] announced that golf star Gary Player had become a director of the CFS; then the name of cricket personality Wilf Isaacs was added,” he writes. “The press seemed satisfied, no one hinted even vaguely that the government might be involved.”

The CFS was “extremely active” in countries such as the US, Britain and Australia, with whom South Africa had close sporting ties, according to Rhoodie’s 1983 book, The Real Information Scandal.

The National Party government spent R520 000 (almost R14 million in 2020) on the CFS, according to Rhoodie. This funded trips to the UK, US, Australia and Japan, and paid for a series of adverts in foreign newspapers aimed at combating the boycott of South African athletes. In 1981, the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid listed Player among the more than 250 athletes from 22 countries who had taken part in activities that violated the boycott of apartheid sport.

Ambassador for apartheid
Rhoodie writes that Player’s involvement with the information department was a lot more involved than simply serving as a director of the CFS. “Between 1975 and 1978, when we were struggling to prevent American investors taking their money out of South Africa, Player played a most important role.

“At our request, he wrote letters to carefully selected top executives of major companies in the United States … inviting them to visit South Africa and play golf with him for a whole week. They were all keen golf players, and a private invitation from a bank for a week’s golf with Gary Player is easily accepted,” he writes. “Ten invitations from [then South African minister of foreign affairs] Pik Botha would carry no weight.”

By day, the executives would play golf with Player. By night, they’d meet with South African business and political stakeholders, writes Rhoodie. The Cabinet compensated Player for this work to replace the money he “would otherwise have won had he been away on the professional circuit”.


Player was not the only one to benefit from this arrangement. Rhoodie writes that his brother, Ian Player, received funds for 15 bursaries every year for his Wilderness Leadership School, so that “children from prominent families in the USA could visit South Africa”.

Luyt and Player would pop up again in another information scandal front, The Citizen newspaper, which was launched in 1976. Journalists Mervyn Rees and Chris Day write in their 1980 book Muldergate that Player was a director of The Citizen when it launched, alongside Beurt SerVaas, an American newspaper editor and politician who had worked as an agent for the US Central Intelligence Agency and was alleged to have maintained a relationship with the agency after he left.

The safe house
Another curious anecdote from Apartheid Guns and Money, written by non-profit research group Open Secrets’ Hennie van Vuuren and published in 2017, details how the Gary Player estate in Johannesburg was used as a “safe house” for meetings between foreign intelligence officials and South African military officials. Player no longer owned the mansion; the new owner was TGS International, a company set up by former CIA agent Ted Shackley.

With these stories from Player’s history as context, perhaps the fact that an American president who has been accused of being a “racist” and “white supremacist” is giving Player this award shouldn’t shock us. But to South Africans who suffered under apartheid, a system that a number of books suggest was enabled by Player’s global brand and golfing abilities, this award is hurtful, inappropriate and unnecessary.

Gary Player gets top award despite apartheid role

The legendary golfer who helped prop up the apartheid regime will be awarded a prestigious prize by a president who has been accused of being a white supremacist and has made racist statements.

www.newframe.com

 

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Gold medalist Olympic swimmer recognized amid Capitol mob

Klete Keller, a swimmer and two-time Olympic gold medal winner for the United States, was recognized by former teammates and coaches as one of the participants in the deadly pro-Trump mob that over…

thehill.com

Gold medalist Olympic swimmer recognized amid Capitol mob
BY CELINE CASTRONUOVO - 01/12/21 03:29 PM EST 1,265
6,793



Klete Keller, a swimmer and two-time Olympic gold medal winner for the United States, was recognized by former teammates and coaches as one of the participants in the deadly pro-Trumb mob that overtook the Capitol last week.'

Swimming news website SwimSwam on Monday was the first to report on Keller’s apparent presence at the riot, noting that at least a dozen people in the swimming community had identified him in video footage posted on social media by a reporter from a conservative outlet, Townhall.
In the clip, the man recognized as the 6-foot-6 Keller is seen wearing a U.S. Olympic team jacket with “USA” printed on the back and down the sleeves as he stands over a crowd that was pushing and shoving police officers attempting to clear the Capitol Rotunda.




On Tuesday, The New York Times reported the story, noting that the video had circulated on social media among the swimming community in the past week, and several have already reported Keller, a former teammate of swimming superstar Michael Phelps, to authorities.
Both news outlets noted that while Keller has deleted his social media accounts, he previously used them to vocalize his support for President Trump.

Keller, 38, was on three U.S. Olympic teams, winning golds at the Athens Games in 2004 and at the Beijing Games in 2008 as a member of the 4 x 200-meter relay team. He also won silver in the event at the 2000 Sydney Games.

The Times reported that efforts to reach out to Keller were unsuccessful, noting that a call to a cellphone number listed under his name gave a message that he was not available.

Keller had most recently worked as a real estate agent in Colorado Springs with the agency Hoff & Leigh. While the company initially confirmed Keller’s employment to SwimSwam, Hoff & Leigh had removed Keller’s profile from its website by Monday night.
When contacted by the Times, a woman who answered the phone at the company Tuesday said, “We can’t give out any information on that at this moment.”

A spokesperson for Hoff & Leigh declined to comment when contacted by The Hill.

Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with last week’s siege on the Capitol. Five people died amid the chaos, including a woman who was shot by a Capitol Police officer and an officer who died after sustaining injuries while responding to the riot. Three others died after experiencing “medical emergencies” near the Capitol grounds.

No video released from Wednesday’s events appears to show Keller participating in any violent acts while at the Capitol.

 

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Fans Rip WFT QB Taylor Heinicke After Finding Out He’s a Trump Supporter

After playing a pretty fantastic game against Tom Brady's Bucs, Taylor Heinicke's political views came under scrutiny after surfacing online.

www.complex.com

Fans Rip WFT QB Taylor Heinicke After Finding Out He’s a Trump Supporter
BYDANIEL BARNA
Jan 10, 2021

Image via Getty/Mitchell Layton

The Washington Football Team wasn't given much of a chance against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during Saturday night's NFC wild-card game. That was especially true with the unproven Taylor Heinicke under center.

The 27-year-old quarterback was playing in place of the injured Alex Smith, and while he wasn't able to lead his team to victory, he performed a lot better than people expected. One play in particular—in which he evaded a sack and stretched out into the end zone for a touchdown—turned heads.







The excerpts you see above originated from an August 2020 piece examining Heinicke's long history of supporting Trump, and his questionable stance on the protests over social injustice that swept the nation last year. Once people online caught wind of Heinicke's particular views, the honeymoon for some, was over.

 

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this is just DISGUSTING...

they STILL trying to make excuses for him?

You realize something...

he was right he gave that famous speech about how he could KILL someone and not go to jail.



Whelp... he was right

cause a that officer who was beaten to death, those others who died, that woman who was shot in the face?

HE DID THAT

and ALL these white folks do not five one single solitary f*ck.​

 

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Tim Allen breaks silence on Capitol attack: 'Shameful' and bad for conservatives

"It's embarrassing and shameful," the Last Man Standing star says, though he suggests conservatives are being unfairly lumped together.
By James Hibberd
January 12, 2021 at 05:13 PM EST

As Tim Allen wraps up one show (Fox's Last Man Standing) and prepares to launch another (The History Channel's gadget competition series Assembly Required), the actor gave his thoughts on last week's U.S. Capitol attack during an interview with EW on Tuesday.

The 67-year-old actor and comedian has long been considered one of Hollywood's few outspoken conservatives, though he somewhat pushes back against that label. "I'm a fiscally conservative and an emotionally liberal guy," he says. "I want people taken care of on the social side. I think most people are like that. If you think the government can handle stuff, just look at the rollout of this vaccine."

Weighing in on the Capitol breach by the MAGA mob on Jan. 6, Allen calls it "horrible, embarrassing, and shameful," and has some criticism of President Trump, who has been widely blasted for refusing to accept the general election results and for his inciting rhetoric leading up to, and during, the attack. "Why didn't the powers-that-be go [to the Capitol]?" Allen asks. "When I was watching that, I felt that the president should have been a stand-up guy and go there with his security and say, 'Hey, come on. No, no, no, no.' Maybe they don't allow that."

When I point out that Trump could have told the crowd to leave without going there in person, Allen replies, "He could do whatever he wanted. Go there yourself. Say, 'Come on out, people… I never said any of this. That was not in that speech. I never said, Go storm the Capitol,' or whatever."
(Before the attack, Trump told his supporters at his rally speech, "Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal… And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down… You have to show strength, and you have to be strong… I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.")

Allen also expresses some disbelief that the mob didn't have some inside help, something some lawmakers have wondered as well, though images have emerged showing protesters shoving, kicking, and punching Capitol officers to get inside. Allen suggests that some of the rioters might not have realized they were breaking the law by breaching the federal building.

"I've been there before and it's impossible to get in that building," Allen says. "I couldn't get in, and I had credentials. They wouldn't let us in. So who opened the door? I got to believe that people at the back [of the crowd] didn't know that they had broken the door. They were going, 'Oh look, they're letting us in.' There were 120,000 people outside that had no idea this was going on. [Ashli E. Babbitt] who was shot was not a radical, she was an Air Force veteran. Why was she shot? It's so sad anybody got hurt over this."

Babbitt was one of five people who died during the attack. She was shot by an officer as she attempted to enter a broken-in window inside the Capitol.

"Let's bring journalism back," Allen adds. "I want the guys with the pencil behind their ear and go out and get the story. I miss reporters that were annoying and just asked questions, asked questions, asked questions — not [gave] their opinion. Go look at local news. If they say there's a fire in Burbank, that's news. The reporter is not telling you, 'It's a remarkable fire caused by stupid people of this [political] party.'"

Since the attack, Allen says, people who tilt conservative, "even by a variance of degrees," are "in the closet now."

"If you were just on the other side of the [political] fence, you're in the closet now because of how shamefully that was handled," he says. "It's an embarrassment for anybody who just didn't like [the Democratic Party]. So there's nothing to say. It would be a great thing to see [President-elect Joe Biden] — and everybody wants him to do well — say, 'That was a stupid thing, let's move on, don't keep harping on it.' But I don't think that's going to happen."

According to the FBI, MAGA activists also might not be ready to move on as thousands of National Guard troops are set to be deployed amid warnings of armed protests planned at all 50 state capitals.


The actor also tackles the subject of social media, something he feels increasingly ambivalent about.

"I've never quite understood what [social media] was about," Allen says. "When my family moved after a family tragedy [when I was a kid] across the country and I went from being in a cool group at one school to being at the bottom [of the social hierarchy at another], and then seeing things from a different point of view. For me, it reminds me of the cool group at school and if you don't agree with them, if you don't play the game right, you get shamed — or I don't know what the right word is. I just had this conversation with somebody about my Twitter account. I asked, 'What am I actually doing with Twitter?' This has been really weird for comedy because of this virus. I have no way to express myself because if you're tweeting it, depending on who you offend, the thought police are going to come back.

"I think they're reacting to gossip," he adds. "And really, is gossip doing anything? Is social media really doing anything? I'm an old philosophy major. If you have a problem with a car and you do some social media about the problem, you ain't done nothing. The car is still not driving, you've just talked about it. Social media is like putting your car in neutral and just revving it. It seems like you're doing something — the car is making noise — but you're not going anywhere."

The ninth and final season of Allen's Last Man Standing is currently airing Thursday nights on Fox, and his Assembly Required is coming soon to The History Channel.

 

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Why Are the Backstreet Boys Tweeting About QAnon?
By Justin Curto

Kevin Richardson, left, and Brian Littrell of the Backstreet Boys. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Getty Images
Kevin Richardson and Brian Littrell have been Backstreet Boys bandmates for nearly three decades and cousins for even longer, but it looks like their bond is being tested. Richardson caught the attention of fans on January 13 when he tweeted an October Cosmopolitan essay headlined “I Lost a Friend to QAnon,” with the caption “Interesting read… ✌ ❤.” Richardson followed that tweet with another Cosmopolitan essay, from the day before, titled “The Unlikely Connection Between Wellness Influencers and the Pro-Trump Rioters,” which he called “Another interesting read… ✌ ❤.” While Richardson could’ve just been having a good time reading Cosmo, his tweets looked pretty pointed to fans who’d been following the Backstreet Boys recently. Just days before, on January 8, a Littrell tweet directed his fans to his account on Parler, the controversial app currently banned from the Apple and Google Play stores, and now offline after Amazon Web Services discontinued hosting it. Parler is a favorite platform of far-right figures, conspiracy theorists, and QAnon supporters, and has been taken off these platforms due to its lack of moderation and posts inciting violence.





Littrell’s tweet came the same night that President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Littrell has been a vocal supporter of the president for years, even telling TMZ that he wanted the Backstreet Boys to perform at Trump’s inauguration. (Littrell later said “it didn’t work out” with the rest of the band, citing their Las Vegas residency.) There’s no clear evidence that Littrell has fallen further into far-right conspiracies, but Richardson’s tweets could be directed at his bandmate and cousin. (For his part, Richardson also spent the day of the Capitol riot and the following day retweeting reports about the riot and statements denouncing the violence.) Meanwhile, AJ just celebrated his birthday and is repping the Biden-Harris administration, Nick is having a baby, and Howie is barely on social media at all these days. Not everybody’s playing games with our hearts.

 

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Posted Live From the Inferno
By Jerry Saltz
A pro-Trump mob invades the Capitol Building on January 6. Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Incredible pictures streamed out of Washington, D.C., on January 6. Staggering, depressing, laughably birdbrained images of self-styled revolutionaries, QAnon crackpots, Wall Street types in baseball caps and flak jackets, paranoids, cultists, grandmas, goons, Oath Keepers, burnouts, paintball guerrillas, conspiracy theorists, retirees, and stay-at-home alt-right dads armed with spears, guns, and tasers. Many of these were photographs taken of the mob by the mob. We saw videos made by news crews and rioters alike. All showed us an ocean of mostly white people in red hats surging up to and inside the U.S. Capitol Building, crashing through windows, beating (or taking selfies with) police, and calling for the deaths of members of the U.S. government.
After Trump finished his speech at his “Save America” rally last week, I turned off the TV. But the danger in the air made me turn it back on. I started scrolling through social media and right-wing sites, and the images flooded in. No one pictured attacking the Capitol appeared to have the slightest fear of repercussions. Some carried “This Is Our 1776” signs. I saw videos of people falling while trying to scale walls; some seemed to spray their own cohorts with mace, while others carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were shoved down by compatriots with the same flag. It was like watching a dog eating its own feces, a clown act, and an actual insurrection all at once. Together, these images are some of the scariest and stupidest I have ever seen.

They’re also unsurprising in the extreme.
As an older person, I recognize in the pictures something that has been here my whole life, something familiar: a look in the mob’s faces that I saw on TV as I watched MLK march not far from my childhood home in the Chicago suburb of Cicero in 1966. Back then, I watched white Americans who looked just like my neighbors screaming, consumed, animalistic, archaic. I turned away from the TV and saw the same look on my stepmother’s face. My step-brothers said King should be shot. I later saw it firsthand in the summer of 1968, when I took the subway to protests in Chicago’s Grant Park. It was in the faces of the policemen and later in those of Chicago machine politicians. The pictures from the January 6 mob are not pictures of the underdog.
As an art critic, I take a step back to access the deeper contents of these strange images. In the pictures of that day, I see totemism, tribal warfare, incompetence, half-madness, vengeance, white privilege, rage, cruelty. These pictures are what would happen if Facebook became flesh. These are people all speaking at once to everyone else, all claiming that their facts are real and everyone else’s are fake. This gives the pictures a new kind of uncanniness — the group mind doing old things in new languages while sharing a single nervous system. As primary documents, they are intimate. Scrolling through, we storm the Capitol barricades with the red-hatted mob; we surge forward, make our way up and down stairwells, get lost. We hear the laughing, the chants of “Hang Mike Pence,” the members of the mob asking where the bathrooms are. On Parler and Newsmax, I watched invaders watching themselves on their own social-media platforms. The feedback loop was astonishing and insane, the moment transformed into a sort of collective far-right group portrait.
I also notice what we don’t see in them: Trump. He watched the riot unfold the same way the rest of us did, onscreen. These pictures show the crowd finally on its own, acting as one, with no constraints and almost no authority in sight.
What other images have ever looked this way? Fellini gave us crazed carnivals of decadence, ugliness, barbarism, and corpulence. I flash on history paintings of vast armies clashing; on January 6, the crowd donned vivid red, a deluded Trumpist army laying siege to a building, all while carrying flags and banners. Bosch pictured mindless insanity in hell: people endlessly spurting bats from their asses, being stabbed for all eternity, gripped, sickened souls. Here, I see a crowd of political cannibals, feeding on one another’s obsessions.
Follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Christ in Limbo, 1450–1516. Photo: Public Domain
I am reminded of three earlier photographs that stood in for an entire event or era and changed it: Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of the naked 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, screaming and running after she and her village in Vietnam were napalmed by American bombers; David Jackson’s 1955 image of the battered body of 14-year-old Emmett Till, murdered by white men; and John Filo’s 1970 image of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller after he was shot by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State.
The difference in these new pictures, however, is sadly telling. In fact, we are already seeing that exact perversion of the “meaning” of these images in the herculean effort being made by elected Republican representatives and all of right-wing media to twist these pictures into things that they are not: the regretful expression of only a few, an exercise in free speech. The rioters themselves seem to think that they are the burning girl, the murdered boy, the crying woman. These new pictures are unlike those older pictures in another way too: People are already shrugging them off. The older pictures still burn.
The riot at the Capitol wasn’t America’s first rendezvous with destiny in this century: The other, of course, was September 11, 2001. Both events gave us something tragic and unimagined, unfolding in the span of only a few hours and watched in real time around the world. But the images and events of January 6 are, once again, not the same.
The images of the fallen towers were abstract: Death was seen in the absence of bodies, the missing buildings. We saw only smoke, fire, ash, a ruined skyline. This abstraction made it possible for authorities to interpret those photos any way they wanted and then pin the blame elsewhere, starting what has now been nearly 20 years of war. The pictures from September 11 seemed to show annihilation, an invading force from outside — an archaic force slamming into modern politics. In these new pictures, that demonic force is us.