Elizabeth Neumann, a former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention in the Trump administration who endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden last week, alleged Wednesday that President Trump enabled white supremacists and ignored pandemic warnings.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
KEY FACTS
In a video for pro-Biden group Republican Voters Against Trump, Neumann says she is “first and foremost a follower of Jesus Christ” who voted for Trump in 2016 for his anti-abortion stance.
Noting the rise in white supremacy in the Trump era, Neumann said Trump’s rhetoric made her job more difficult, calling his language and actions “racist” and alleging he “gave permission” to white supremacists.
On the topic of the pandemic, Neumann says experts told her “we need to be executing on these plans,” but that Trump told officials to stop doing their jobs because “he didn’t want the economy to tank and he didn’t want a distraction from his campaign.”
In an interview with Politico, Neumann and several other former Trump Homeland Security officials alleged inaction on white supremacy by the administration, with Neumann asserting “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism” and stating that Trump “botched” his response to Charlottesville by saying “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Neumann also claimed the White House has a “single-minded focus on immigration enforcement,” noting that budgetary requests at DHS are “always in competition for [border] wall money.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“I do not think that we can afford four more years of President Trump,” Neumann said, concluding, “We are less safe today because of his leadership. We will continue to be less safe as long as he is in control.”
KEY BACKGROUND
Before her time in the Trump administration, Neumann served on the Homeland Security Council in the Bush White House, a role in which she “tracked terrorist threats and developed domestic prevention and mitigation strategies and programs,” according to the DHS website. In the Trump administration, she worked as Deputy Chief of Staff of DHS and as a senior advisor to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, and Acting Secretary Elaine Duke before serving as Assistant Secretary. She departed the administration in April, according to Politico, and endorsed Biden alongside over 70 other Republican security officials.
CHIEF CRITIC
“Our brave federal law enforcement, national security, and Intelligence officials work around the clock to monitor every range of threats facing our nation, including domestic terror,” White House spokesperson Alyssa Farah toldPolitico. The White House declined to comment further to Forbes.
SURPRISING FACT
Neumann is far from alone as a Republican backing Biden. Scores of Republican lawmakers and former executive branch officials have publicly endorsed him, including former Republican Senator and Defense Secretary Bill Cohen on Wednesday. Several other Trump administration officials have endorsed Biden as well, including former Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, who alleged Trump claimed “magical authorities” beyond the law.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Taylor predicts even more Trump officials will come forward before the election. “The president hasn’t heard the last of us,” Taylor told ABC News earlier this month, calling his allegations the “opening salvo.”
Carquinez Village invited Benicia Police Chief Erik Upson to speak to the community via Zoom last Monday. I’m using today’s column to report on that meeting.
Chief Upson began with a national perspective, saying that national standards for policing on testing, hiring, ongoing training, etc. don’t exist. Contrary to other occupations, a podiatrist, for example, for which national standards exist, the consumer can rely on a podiatrist anywhere in the nation having similar training.
Chief Erik Upson
The chief’s philosophy is that “culture is most important.” Even if a police agency has good guidelines written down, bad things can happen, depending on the culture. Egregious events such as happened in Minneapolis can occur if the culture doesn’t reflect the written policy. More about this later.
Chief Upson said his philosophy is “We’re neighbors. We care about the whole community.” He went on to say that he tries to follow a policy of being a great human being. Caring about other people. When he interviews a candidate to work in his department, he goes out to coffee with them, to try to get a sense of the person. He talked about the “golden shovel” award, which is about “recognizing and rewarding officers for exemplifying our culture, going out of their way to do something that benefits the community though it might not fit in the more accepted perception of what policing is about. Caring about people as people and manifesting a true sense of caring about humanity.” Upson understands the need to respect everyone and learn to recognize our own implicit bias, something we all have, but aren’t always aware of.
Chief Upson was asked if blacks, even blacks who live in Benicia, are stopped more frequently than whites. Of course, he’s aware of racial profiling, but he wouldn’t want that to happen here. He’s been Benicia’s Police Chief for five years, so he has hired most of the police force. He tries to weed out people who don’t fit with his philosophy.
In New York, a young white woman called the police on a black man who was bird watching, saying he had threatened her. Since the incident was recorded, it was easy to see that wasn’t the case. He’d asked her to put her dog on leash. Upson has a policy that, if someone calls and complains about another person, but doesn’t indicate that the other person has committed or is committing a crime, the police may not follow up on the call.
He was asked about the possibility of having town hall meetings here, as some other communities have, to discuss racial inequities; he thought that a good idea. Schools also came up in a question to the chief. He said that two officers work with the schools, endeavoring to have good relationships with the children and the staff.
One person asked the chief about the release of 8,000 prisoners in California due to outbreaks of the Corona Virus in prisons. Upson said they get a list of anyone being released who has ties to Solano County. They would check out the situation if appropriate. He pointed out that many people being released are older people over 65, who were scheduled to be released in 90-120 days.
Another person asked about handling of homeless people. Approximately 40 people are identified as homeless in Benicia. Working with the county, Benicia police try to help by getting these folks into shelters, and offering other mitigations, as appropriate.
Upson has been a police officer for 30 years and has never shot anyone, though he certainly recognizes the need for officers to carry guns, reminding us there are 250-300 million guns in the country and a good number of people quite willing to use them.
He was also asked about crime during these times of COVID-19. He said there is an increase in property crime—stealing of cars and damaging property, not breaking into homes, as most people are at home now. “There is also an uptick in domestic violence,” according to the chief.
He was also asked what “taking the knee” means to him. He said it’s a “demonstration of caring.” Some people, when hearing the slogan “black lives matter” ask “don’t all lives matter?” Upson remarked that “when a house is on fire” you turn your attention to that. It doesn’t mean that other houses (or lives) are any less valued.
I mentioned earlier about Chief Upson’s approach that “culture trumps everything.” So, I asked the chief how the culture can be changed. He answered that it takes time, modeling good behavior, and leadership.
In terms of implicit bias, he said the department has made a Public Service Announcement (PSA), and he is aware of the concept of “restorative justice.” In that regard, I’d like to add a link here of an article I’ve read on that subject.
He urged us to ask if we have needs or questions, and I think that applies to the entire community. Chief Upson was approachable, direct, and honest about the situations the department faces and his philosophy about the best ways to handle whatever comes up. I was pleased to spend the hour in conversation with him. I should also point out, that on the city’s website there’s much more information about the police.
White backlash to Black Lives Matter was swift. It was also expected
San Francisco Chronicle, by Otis R. Taylor Jr. July 9, 2020
Justin Gomez at the site of a Black Lives Matter mural that he and his wife, Angela helped organize and that had been defaced shortly after being completed in Martinez, Calif., on Tuesday, July 7, 2020. The couple that vandalized the Black Lives Matter mural (since restored) on Court Street on July 4th, has been charged with a hate crime each for their actions. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
The expected hostility toward the racial uprising energizing the country has begun.
It was expected by behaviorists and historians because history reveals that when some white people feel threatened by social justice movements, they lash out.
On July 4, the paint had barely dried on the 165-foot long Black Lives Matter mural on the street in front of the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse in Martinez when a man and a woman showed up. They dumped black paint on the yellow letters.
“This is not happening in my town,” the woman said as she spread the paint with a roller.
The hateful display of counterfeit patriotism was video-recorded by bystanders and went viral. On Tuesday, Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton charged Nicole Anderson and David Nelson with a hate crime for defacing the mural.
“It was a peaceful mural, and it was a powerful way, as we’ve seen all over the country, that has been used to think about the importance of Black lives,” Becton told me. “But this one in particular was to think about the importance of Black lives in Contra Costa County.”
The county is roughly 43% white, according to census data. Black people make up less than 10% of the county’s population, while Latinos account for about 26% of county residents.
A 2018 report by UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project and the California Housing Partnership studied housing prices and demographic changes in the county from 2000 to 2015 to, among other things, understand trends producing “patterns of segregation and unequal access to high-resource neighborhoods that have defined the county’s racial and economic geography for decades.”
By 2015, the report concluded, “approximately half of low-income Black and Latinx households in the county lived in segregated, high-poverty tracts — approximately triple the rate of low-income Asian and White households, and a steep increase from 2000. Families in these types of neighborhoods typically face greater barriers to economic mobility [and] are more likely to suffer adverse health outcomes.”
Once again, systemic racism impacts the health, economic and educational outcomes of people of color.
The permitted Black Lives Matter mural in Martinez was repainted almost immediately, but get this: The very next day, a man was arrested for allegedly pulling a gun on people looking at the mural, according to the Police Department.
The retaliation is driven by hate, resentment and fear. Don’t be surprised if it lasts beyond next year’s presidential inauguration.
“These are old means of subordination that white people have used,” said UC Berkeley psychology Professor Dacher Keltner, referring to recent viral incidents, including in Indiana where a Black man was attacked in the woods by white men. “This racism is the fabric of this culture.”
And when protesters rallied earlier this week to support Vauhxx Booker, the Black man who called the Indiana incident an “attempted lynching,” someone drove their car through the crowd, NBC News reported.
Wait, there’s more. A white woman used the N-word while arguing with a Black woman in a Sacramento-area convenience store on June 25. A white diner called someone enjoying a family celebration at a Carmel Valley restaurant an “Asian piece of s—.”
“Trump’s gonna f— you,” he said, rising from the table.
He already has.
The president is a grifter who knows hate is currency in America. He stokes white fear and resentment by painting Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists and thugs. On July 1, he called Black Lives Matter murals symbols of hate. If his lies were your main source of information about people of color, you’d think the white, Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous people marching for social justice were a bigger threat to this country than the coronavirus.
“The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism — it’s a lie,” said the man in the Martinez incident, identified as Nelson, who wore a red T-shirt with “four more years” on the front. “Why don’t you guys learn about history?”
Once again, ignorance is a hallmark of white supremacy.
Here’s a brief lesson in American history: Southern white people went to war and sacrificed a generation to preserve the right to buy, sell and trade Black bodies. Then this country built statues to honor human traffickers and to remind Black people that their place — no, our lives — were conditional. After slavery was abolished, the lynchings of Black people became appointment viewing. Black people’s homes, churches and offices were bombed during the civil rights movement.
I could go on, but you get the historical context. In this country, when some white people feel their way of life — their status — is threatened, they respond with violence.
Dana Frank, a research professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, told me that some white resentment turns into anger instead of reflection.
“There’s white people that are well-meaning or confused and clueless, and then there’s the people who are actively crossing over into hostility. The second category is much harder to reach,” she said. “I think it’s very hard for your average white person to see all those forms of institutionalized racism in which they come out ahead. How do you open the door to somebody seeing that without that person feeling threatened?”
By getting white people to talk to white people about systemic racism.
Justin Gomez, who obtained the permit for the street mural, organized the effort a week after flyers calling for white unity were distributed in Martinez. Gomez, who is Filipino and was raised in Walnut Creek, has two children. He’s a stay-at-home dad, and his wife is a health care worker.
He told me he was blown away at how quickly the mural was defaced. Then again, he lives in Contra Costa County.
“We see Confederate flags,” Gomez said. “We see a lot of racist rhetoric in our local social media circles, so we fully knew that that was going to happen and we were ready for it.”
Six gallons of yellow paint were delivered to him Monday.
It’s ‘Our Fault’: Nextdoor CEO Takes Blame For Deleting Of Black Lives Matter Posts
NPR All Things Considered, by Bobby Allyn, July 1, 2020
Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, here in July 2019, tells NPR the popular neighborhood app is taking steps to address reports of racial profiling and censorship on the platform. Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg via Getty Images
As protests swept the nation following the police killing of George Floyd, there was a surge of reports that Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social media app, was censoring posts about Black Lives Matter and racial injustice.
In an interview with NPR, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar said the company should have moved more quickly to protect posts related to Black Lives Matter by providing clearer guidance.
It “was really our fault” that moderators on forums across the country were deleting those posts, she said.
People of color have long accused Nextdoor, which serves as a community bulletin board in more than 265,000 neighborhoods across the U.S., of doing nothing about users’ racist comments and complaints. But Nextdoor came under especially heavy criticism in May after the company voiced public support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Unpaid volunteers, known as leads, moderate posts on Nextdoor. Friar said they were deleting posts about Black Lives Matter because they were following outdated rules stating that national conversations have no place in neighborhood forums. Those guidelines have now been revised to state that conversations about racial inequality and Black Lives Matter are allowed on Nextdoor.
“We did not move quickly enough to tell our leads that topics like Black Lives Matter were local in terms of their relevance,” Friar said. “A lot of our leads viewed Black Lives Matter as a national issue that was happening. And so, they removed that content, thinking it was consistent with our guidelines.”
She added that the new rules make one thing clear: “Black Lives Matter is a local topic.”
Friar said that Nextdoor is taking several more steps to improve the moderation of comments. It will soon offer unconscious bias training to all moderators. It will also launch a campaign to enlist more Black moderators. And it is ramping up efforts to detect and remove instances of racial profiling.
Apologizing, then asking for help from Black users
Neighbors take to Nextdoor to search for a local plumber, find a babysitter or sell a piece of furniture. But the app also has gained notoriety for spreading panicked messages that carry racist overtones.
In recent weeks, as the national conversation has centered on racial injustice, Black users have shared their stories of abandoning Nextdoor. One person wrote on Twitter that they stopped using it after reading repeated complaints about “large groups of black teens walking in their neighborhood.” Another tweeted that their neighbors would write messages such as “Saw a black youth hanging out next door. Calling the cops.”
Mayisha Fruge, 42, a black mother of two in San Diego, Calif., who is active on Nextdoor, said those kinds of post sound familiar.
About 90% of her neighbors come across as good, decent people on the app, she said.
“That other 10 percent? They must be hiding behind the computer. I never would have thought that my neighborhood had those types of people, racist people in it,” she told NPR.
In one post, a neighbor was suspicious about a black person who was simply taking a stroll. Another asked: do the Black Lives Matter protesters have jobs?
“I said, what does this have to do with equality and justice?” Fruge said.
Friar has apologized to Black users who have said they do not feel welcomed or respected on the app, vowing that racism has no place on Nextdoor.
She also announced that Nextdoor was cutting off a tie to law enforcement by ending a “forward to police” feature that allowed users to report observed activity to authorities.
But Friar told NPR that Nextdoor’s efforts to combat racism on the app will go even further.
Nextdoor has enlisted Stanford University psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt to help slow down the speed of comments to tamp down on racial profiling,and it’s working with her to make unconscious bias training available to hundreds of thousands of moderators.
It is a change that some Nextdoor users have demanded. In an online petition, they criticized the app’s “murky” guidelines for content moderation, which users said led to abuse and the silencing of Black voices.
In response to Nextdoor’s commitments, the Atlanta-based group Neighbors for More Neighbors, which helped organize the petition, applauded the news but remained cautious.
“This is a positive step towards creating a true community forum where all people in our neighborhoods feel safe to participate,” said activist Andrea Cervone with the group. “We will be keeping an eye on the company to make sure they continue forward and fulfill these public commitments.”
In Northwest Indiana, Jennifer Jackson-Outlaw had a lukewarm reception to the company’s announcements. Jackson, a black woman who became fed up with Nextdoor and deleted the app, said Nextdoor’s mostly white executive suite needs a shakeup in order to effect real cultural change at the company.
“It’s important to not only have representation as far as those who are the moderator, but also those who are in the leadership of the company who may be more be well-versed on some of the issues,” she said.
At Nextdoor, Friar has kicked off an effort to recruit more Black leads. This includes inviting especially active Black users to become moderators and starting outreach campaigns to encourage Black users to join the app.
“We recognize that is an underrepresented group on Nextdoor,” Friar said of Black users. “There are others of course, but we want to start there because we really feel that the Black Lives Matter movement is so critical and important right now just to the health of our country.”
Friar described Nextdoor’s content moderation as “a layered cake,” saying it involves local moderators, artificial intelligence tools and the company’s human reviewers.
She said that the app’s AI programs are being fine-tuned to better detect both explicit racism and posts that engage in racial profiling, or what she called “coded racist content.” Nextdoor is now dedicating more staff to focus on attempting to ferret out racist content on the app.
“We’re really working hard to make sure racist statements don’t end up in the main news feed, making sure that users that don’t act out the guidelines aren’t on the platform anymore,” Friar said. “It is our No. 1 priority at the company to make sure Nextdoor is not a platform where racism survives.”
Confronting the ‘Karen problem’
Though anecdotal evidence suggests Nextdoor’s user base is largely white, Friar said the company has no internal metrics about the race of its users.
The app does not ask about race when users sign up, a decision that Friar said may soon change as the company examines how best to hold itself accountable in its push to diversify the platform.
“We are debating that,” she said. “Because if we want to measure our success of being a diverse platform, perhaps that’s something we do need to ask.”
Critics of Nextdoor, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have drawn attention to the app’s so-called Karen problem. It’s a term that has come to describe a middle-aged, privileged white woman with racist habits, whether overt or subtle.
When asked if Nextdoor has a Karen problem, Friar deflected by saying any intolerance or racism on the app is a snapshot of issues plaguing the entire country, not problems confined to the neighborhood platform.
“Does the U.S. have that problem? Yes, it’s out there,” Friar said. “But I think we’re working as hard as we can to make sure neighbors are doing right by each other, that they’re being civil, being respectful and that they’re not falling back to calling each other names but rather trying to deeply understand.”
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