Taking on Trump: Xavier Becerra

Some of us never imagined we’d ever see such a thing happening in the United States: last Thursday, Xavier Becerra, Attorney General of California, warned employers in that state that if they assist federal officials who are looking for illegal immigrants, they will be prosecuted.

Xavier Becerra

More on that later. But first, who is Xavier Becerra? Born in Sacramento to Mexican immigrants, he went to college in Spain before earning a B.A. and J.D. from Stanford. After working in a private law practice, he went into politics, serving, in turn, as an assistant to a California state senator, as the state’s Deputy Attorney General, as a member of the State Assembly, and as a member of Congress. California Governor Jerry Brown named him state Attorney General on January 23 of last year. He is the first Latino to hold that position.

Becerra to Trump: “Be careful!”

His ideological agenda was clear from the start. A sympathetic profile of Becerra in the Atlantic began with the news that he was “issu[ing] a warning to the President of the United States:

“Be careful,” he said in a singsongy voice. “Be careful!” A wicked smile appeared.

Becerra, wrote Atlantic reporter Michelle Cottle, “clearly relishes his role as a burr in Donald Trump’s backside.” What business does a state Attorney General have issuing warnings to Presidents or being burrs in their backsides? Why was the new Attorney General of America’s largest state focused on challenging the newly elected President’s politics rather than on prosecuting people arrested for committing crimes in his (frankly) crime-ridden state?

Becerra’s ideologies allies

When talking to Cottle, Becerra had nothing to say about such matters – which are, after all, the appropriate province of a state Attorney General. No, what he was interested in was using his new position to push California, and thus the U.S., even further to the left, especially on the issue of illegal immigration. “Becerra sees California playing a special role by virtue of its size and ‘forward leaning’ politics,” wrote Cottle. As Becerra told her: “Sometimes it takes a generation, but we pull the country in certain directions.”

More Becerra allies

His first major action as Attorney General was to join a lawsuit that managed to put the kibosh on President Trump’s January 27 presidential directive that sought to restrict travel to the U.S. from certain Muslim countries that were deemed to represent dangers to American security. When Trump issued a new order on September 24, seeking to limit travel from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iraq, Becerra again leapt into action, accusing Trump of pushing “a political agenda rooted in fear and bias” and insisting that California would “continue to welcome and embrace people of goodwill from all backgrounds, religions, and ethnicities.”

More on Thursday.

Linda Sarsour, sharia apologist

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The Women’s March, January 21

On January 21 of this year, the Women’s March took place in cities around the world. The premise of the event was that Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated president of the United States the day before, is hostile to women and represents a threat to their success and well-being. Millions of women took part in the protests; the official list of speakers in Washington, where the main march took place, included such high-profile names as feminist Gloria Steinem, actress Scarlett Johansson, and TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry.

But there was at least one speaker in Washington who wasn’t a household name. We’re referring to Linda Sarsour, a Brooklyn-born Muslim who was one of the four national co-chairs of the event. Sarsour is also the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and a spokesperson for the National Network for Arab American Communities.

Sarsour, who wore a hijab at the march, began her speech with the words “as-salāmu ʿalaykum.” She then told the crowd: “I stand here before you unapologetically Muslim-American, unapologetically Palestinian American.” Her audience cheered. “Sisters and brothers,” she continued, “you are what democracy looks like!” More cheers. She then said: “I will respect the presidency, but I will not respect this President of the United States of America.” Trump, she explained, “won the election on the backs of Muslims” and other groups. “The Muslim community,” she charged, “has been suffering in silence for the past fifteen years.” Since, that is, 9/11.

Not that she mentioned 9/11. In fact she didn’t mention any of the acts of Islamic terror that have occurred since 2001, both in America and around the world. For her, the history of the last fifteen years has been a history not of one barbaric mass murder after another performed in the name of Islam, but of a silent epidemic of cruel, soul-crushing Islamophobia.

She elaborated on this view on a recent episode of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Muslim children, she maintained, are being killed in the U.S. She offered no evidence or examples, and Maddow did not ask for any. Sarsour also complained that proposed anti-sharia laws in various U.S. states would “prevent Muslims from practicing their faith.” Maddow did not ask her to elaborate on this claim, either. On the contrary, Maddow essentially confirmed Sarsour’s dystopic picture.

Sarsour presents herself as a progressive, a supporter of democracy and freedom, of women’s equality and LGBT rights. But her own record belies this self-representation. Some time before the Women’s March, as it happens, Sarsour deleted innumerable tweets that she had written over the years. Fortunately some of her critics have archived the tweets. They make it clear that she’s not the freedom-lover she pretends to be. Instead, she’s a firm supporter of Hamas and Saudi Arabia. She has tweeted that Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women “puts us [the United States] to shame.” She’s defended Saudi Arabia’s record on women by pointing out that there are women in the Saudi parliament.

And there’s more. Tune in tomorrow.

Fighting for Communism: Sunsara Taylor

As we saw yesterday, Sunsara Taylor is very worked up about the election of Donald Trump. She and her colleagues in a group called Refuse Fascism warn that he’s as bad as Hitler – no, worse! – and call on the entire country to take to the streets and force him out of power. Rarely has any guest on a political interview show seemed as close to outright hysteria as Taylor did on Tucker Carlson Tonight one night in mid February.

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Taylor and friends on the warpath

It’s a shame, because before Trump entered the White House, Taylor was just a quiet housewife who – no, just kidding. In fact, Taylor has spent at least the last decade being splenetic over something or other. Before Refuse Fascism, there were other groups with other names. The complaint varied from group to group. But the rage was always there. The prescription for change was always the same: to bring people out into the streets, screaming and protesting and committing acts of vandalism. And the ultimate goal was always identical – a society living under Communism, Bob Avakian style, with Bob’s Revolutionary Communist Party calling the shots and Bob himself installed as Beloved Leader.

“I’m fighting for Communism,” Taylor said, quite straightforwardly, in a 2010 public appearance. She was quick to acknowledge that historic Communism had erred a bit once or twice, but she assured her audience that Avakian’s supposedly new and improved version of Communism would work out terrifically.

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Anyway, on to Refuse Fascism’s forerunners. One of them was End Pornography and Patriarchy, a movement to eliminate what Taylor described as “The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.” While Trump was still busy making real-estate deals and videotaping episodes of his NBC series The Apprentice, Taylor was getting apoplectic over what she called America’s “war on women.” Of course, according to her there was only one way to stop this “war on women”: to take to the streets, bring down the government, and replace constitutional democracy with “the new synthesis on [sic] revolution and communism developed by Bob Avakian.”

In one of her harangues about “the war on women,” Taylor issued an “urgent call” to all and sundry, young people especially, “who are uncompromising and defiant in their refusal to accept and their determination to defeat the current war on women.” Inviting the members of her audience to join her in “a new movement…that aims to affect all of society” and “change people’s thinking” and “seize back the moral high ground…throughout every corner of society,” Taylor urged them “to go out into the streets…to unmask the horrors that people have grown accustomed to” and “go forward from there until we win.” As part of her campaign, Taylor defended late-term abortion, implying in one video that a fetus doesn’t look like a human baby until after it’s born.

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Taylor being placed under arrest in Texas

One anecdote from 2012 is illuminating. While pro-life activists were holding a street protest during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Taylor and some of her comrades showed up. “They were carrying signs and blowing whistles,” 11-year-old Zoe Griffin told a reporter. “They were jumping around and chanting things like ‘A baby’s not a baby ’til it comes out, that’s what birthdays are all about.’” They were also waving signs that read “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” “They were acting like five-year-old children,” Griffin said. When Taylor saw Griffin and other pro-lifers who themselves were praying while holding signs that read “I’m a person” and that featured images of fetuses, she began screaming at them, pointing to one after another while saying “You’re a person! You’re a person!” When she got to Griffin, she said, “Fetuses are not.” But that wasn’t enough. Taylor told Griffin “you’re a stupid kid.” When Griffin broke into tears, Taylor turned to the adult pro-lifers, including Griffin’s mother, and said: “Look what you’re doing to this little girl with all your bullshit. You’re making this little girl cry!”

More tomorrow.