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For Immediate Release
September, 13 2016, 02:30pm EDT
Tuesday September, 13 2016, 02:30pm EDT
Contact:
Joe Shansky,(414) 218-3331
Pence Again Says KKK Leader Isn't Deplorable
How long will Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson join David Duke in supporting Trump?
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has unprecedented ties to the white nationalist movement. Trump appointed a prominent white supremacist leader as a California delegate to the Republican National Convention, he has retweeted white supremacists dozens of times, and he memorably refused to disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's endorsement. A white supremacist student leader physically assaulted a protester in Kentucky (Trump rallies are notoriously dangerous for people of color), and analysts have documented an increase in harassment and hate crimes nationwide since Trump began his campaign, including in Milwaukee. Trump has made stopping Latinx and Muslim immigration the center of his agenda and has called for stripping US Citizen children of immigrants of their citizenship and deporting them and their families.
On Saturday, when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump's supporters as "deplorables," she was referring to people like former Klan leader and current Republican senatorial candidate David Duke, who has said that Trump's candidacy inspired him to run for Senator. Pressed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday as to whether Duke is "deplorable," Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence said, "No, I'm not in the name-calling business." On Tuesday, Pence again declined to say that Duke is deplorable. Voces de la Frontera Action issued the following response:
"Donald Trump's dangerous attacks on immigrants and Muslims and his continued refusal to distance himself from white supremacists like David Duke are bringing the politics of hate back into the mainstream, and as long as Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson continue to support Trump, they are supporting hate," said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera Action. "The 2016 election is a referendum on the kind of society we want to be: open, democratic and diverse, or cruel, authoritarian and racist. In Wisconsin, Latinxs and immigrants are working hard to make sure that our community votes in historic numbers in November to defeat Trump, Ron Johnson, Paul Ryan, and all the Republicans downballot supporting a billionaire who pals around with the Klan. In 2012 Latinxs rejected Romney and Ryan's 'self-deportation' agenda, and it cost the Republicans the White House. They clearly haven't learned that bigotry is a losing strategy."
Voces de la Frontera is Wisconsin's leading immigrant rights group - a grassroots organization that believes power comes from below and that people can overcome injustice to build a better world.
LATEST NEWS
Speaker Johnson Calls Illegally Occupied West Bank 'Integral Part' of Israel
"International law is completely unambiguous on this question," said one critic. "What settlers call 'Judea and Samaria' is the legal property of the Palestinians—Israel has zero legal claim to the land."
Aug 04, 2025
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday led a high-level Republican delegation on a visit to the occupied West Bank, where the second-in-line to the U.S. presidency told a rapt audience in an illegal Jewish settler colony that they are the rightful owners of the Palestinian territory.
"The mountains of Judea and Samaria are the rightful property of the Jewish people," Johnson (R-La.) said in Ariel, using the biblical name for the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem. Ariel was built on land stolen from the Palestinian towns of Salfit, Marda, and Iskaka after Israeli forces conquered the West Bank in a 1967 war waged on false pretense of an imminent threat of Egyptian and Syrian attack.
"Judea and Samaria are the front line of the state of Israel and must remain an integral part of it," Johnson added.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned Johnson's visit, calling his endorsement of Israeli annexation a "blatant violation of international law."
"All settlement activity is illegal and void," the ministry stressed, adding that Johnson's stance "undermines Arab and American efforts to stop the war and cycle of violence, while flagrantly contradicting the declared U.S. position on settlements and settler violence."
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at least 1,013 Palestinians, including 214 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 2023. Settlers, often protected and sometimes joined by Israeli troops, have launched numerous deadly pogroms and other attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in what critics say is a bid to finish what Israel started in 1948—the total conquest of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of its Arab population, and Israeli annexation.
Johnson, who is reportedly the highest-ranking American official to visit an Israeli settlement, was accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—who while running for president in 2008 denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—as well as Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), and Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.).
Tenney leads the congressional Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus, which supports Israeli annexation of what it calls the "biblical heartland of Israel."
Last month, all 15 Israeli government ministers from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party urged the prime minister to annex the West Bank. On July 23, members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, voted 71-13 in favor of a symbolic measure declaring "Judea and Samaria" to be "an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people" and asserting that "Israel has the natural, historical, and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel."
Netanyahu has repeatedly displayed maps showing the Middle East without Palestine, all of whose territory is shown as part of Israel. Following U.S President Donald Trump's reelection last November, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist party, said that "the year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
The Israeli government has repeatedly approved construction and expansion of settlements in a bid to establish irreversible "facts on the ground" that will survive developments in international law and moves by an increasing number of nations to formally recognize Palestinian statehood.
Around 150 U.N. member states currently recognize or plan to recognize Palestine. Recently, France became the first Group of Seven member to announce it will officially recognize Palestine. Last week, Canada said it would also do so, with conditions attached, and the United Kingdom threatened recognition of Palestine if Israel does not take "substantive steps" to end its annihilation of Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 200,000 people since October 2023.
Last year, the International Court of Justice—which is also weighing a Gaza genocide case against Israel—found that the occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end as soon as possible. Both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 8(2) the International Criminal Court Rome Statute prohibit settlement activity.
Construction of Ariel began in 1978, the same year the U.S. State Department first adopted the official position that Israeli settlements are "inconsistent with international law." That position stood until then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reversed it during the first Trump administration. Biden-era Secretary of State Antony Blinken restored the long-standing State Department position in 2024.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled support for reverting to the first Trump administration's position, and the State Department has lifted sanctions imposed on some extremist settlers during the Biden administration. Last week, one of those settlers, Yinon Levy, allegedly murdered Palestinian peace activist Awda Hathaleen in Umm al-Kheir after the latter was denied entry into the United States to take part in an interfaith speaking tour.
Approximately 750,000 Israelis currently reside in more than 250 illegal settler colonies in the West Bank. While Israel grants every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, it has refused to allow the approximately five million Palestinian refugees—people ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the foundation of Israel in 1948 and their descendants—to exercise their legal right of return to their homeland.
The Republicans' visit to the West Bank followed last week's tour by Huckabee and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff of a Gaza aid distribution center run by a U.S.-backed group condemned for its role in Israeli forces' massacres of desperate people seeking food and other lifesaving aid—a visit denounced by one critic as a "blatant theatrical display."
Greg Casar Calls Emergency March and Picket Outside Texas Governor's Mansion
"If Donald Trump succeeds in ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act for people of color here in Austin, then pretty soon he could succeed in ending those protections for people across America," said Casar during a recent appearance on MSNBC.
Aug 04, 2025
The chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Monday called for an emergency march and picket outside the mansion of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to protest his radical redistricting plan that would shift as many as five seats currently held by Democrats to the Republican Party.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), whose district would be merged with the district of Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) under a Texas GOP plan that was drawn up at the urging of U.S. President Donald Trump, announced on his Facebook page that the rally would take place at 5:30 pm at the governor's mansion in downtown Austin.
"For the first time in the history of Texas, the governor is threatening to make us a one-party state," stated the post. "After Democratic legislators went around the country to rally voters against Abbott and Trump's extreme redistricting scheme, Abbott is now threatening to illegally expel all these Texas Democrats from elected office through a court order."
During a recent appearance on MSNBC, Casar outlined the dangers posed to democracy in the United States if Texas Republicans' plan should come to pass.
"If Donald Trump succeeds in ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act for people of color here in Austin, then pretty soon he could succeed in ending those protections for people across America," he said. "My current district in East Austin... is a Voting Rights Act-protected district to give Latinos in this area voting power. That's part of what MLK marched for when he pushed for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And what they're trying to do here in Austin, as a test case, is to get rid of that. And they wouldn't stop in Austin or in Texas."
What Trump is trying to do here in Austin is a test case for shredding the Voting Rights Act.
We’ve got to stop him here and now. pic.twitter.com/5DrnbD2VU6
— Congressman Greg Casar (@RepCasar) August 2, 2025
Israeli Court Blocks Ouster of Attorney General Prosecuting Netanyahu
"This illegal move constitutes an unprecedented attack on the independence of the Attorney General's Office," said the head of an advocacy group who demanded court intervention.
Aug 04, 2025
Israel's High Court of Justice on Monday issued an injunction blocking the ouster of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara after a unanimous Cabinet vote to fire the woman currently prosecuting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for corruption.
"The court noted that no aspect of her position is to be changed until a future decision is handed down, and that the government cannot name a replacement," The Jerusalem Post reported. "The government and Attorney General's Office have until Thursday to respond. A court hearing will take place on the matter within 30 days, or by September 4."
Shortly after the far-right Cabinet's Monday vote, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party said it formally petitioned the High Court of Justice to intervene, arguing that the "decision was made in an illegal process, bypassing all review mechanisms and intended to harm the independence of the attorney general and subordinate it to a political will."
The advocacy groups Israel Democracy Guard and the Movement for Quality Government in Israel also filed petitions, according to The Times of Israel. The head of the latter organization, Eliad Shraga, said that "this illegal move constitutes an unprecedented attack on the independence of the Attorney General's Office and on the system of checks and balances of Israeli democracy."
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice Yariv Levin had initiated the process to dismiss Baharav-Miara back in March. In anticipation of Monday's vote, High Court Deputy Chief Justice Noam Sohlberg ruled last month that the attempted ouster would require judicial review and not take effect right away.
Despite the injunction, Axios noted Monday, "several Cabinet ministers said Baharav-Miara will now be boycotted. She'll no longer be invited to meetings, and her legal opinions will be disregarded."
The Post pointed out that thousands of people gathered outside of Baharav-Miara's home on Sunday night to support her and protest what they called "the political and illegal attempt to remove her by those seeking to dismantle Israeli democracy."
Netanyahu has been widely accused of dragging out the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip—condemned around the globe as a genocide targeting Palestinians and the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice case—in a bid to avoid his legal trouble at home. He faced similar accusations on Monday.
"Understand that every decision Netanyahu makes, whether it's a war whose aims he has failed to achieve, attempts to gut the Israeli Supreme Court, or now illegally firing the AG prosecuting him, are all informed by his singular goal of staying in power," said Alex Zeldin, a columnist for the American Jewish outlet Forward.
Israel's annihilation of Gaza has been carried out with weapons and diplomatic support from the United States. U.S. leaders have also backed Netanyahu as he has faced an Israeli corruption trial for allegations of breach of trust, bribery, and fraud—as well as an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over the mass killing of Palestinians.
In late June, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on social media that Netanyahu's Israeli trial is a "witch hunt." Last month, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee attended a session in Tel Aviv District Court that was cut short due to Israel's airstrikes on Syria, which occurred despite efforts by that country's rulers to appease the Israeli government.
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