Theres no hiding from Trumps bigotry (WaPo)
By Ishaan Tharoor November 30 at 1:00 AM
President Trump has repeatedly made a show of flouting convention on his Twitter feed, spouting off falsehoods and occasionally pandering to or amplifying once-fringe voices. In that light, a string of retweets he made Wednesday morning could be considered par for the course. They shouldn’t be.
In between tweets bashing media organizations that report stories he doesn’t like, Trump retweeted three videos from the Twitter account of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, an obscure far-right outfit widely considered to be a hate group. Fransen herself faces charges of “religiously aggravated harassment” after she shouted slurs at a hijab-wearing woman walking with her children last year.
The three tweets in question presented videos of murky origin with flat, crude captions: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!,” “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”
It’s hard to imagine why Trump would share these videos for any reason other than to demonize Muslims, something he has done both tacitly and openly ever since he launched his presidential campaign. According to my colleagues, two of the videos Trump circulated to his Twitter followers date as far back as 2013. In one — a video that depicts an Egyptian crowd shoving a teen off a building amid a political protest — a perpetrator was later detained and hanged. And the video of the supposed “Muslim migrant” attacking a Dutch boy, which surfaced this May, featured two Dutch nationals. Neither police nor local news identified either as Muslim or an immigrant.
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/30/theres-no-hiding-from-trumps-bigotry/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_with_top_mostshared_2_na
Most of the content isn't breaking news to DUers, but I thought the headline alone justified a post.