Data Dive: U.S. hate incidents rise sharply after Trump win: civil rights group

By Scott Malone


The number of hate and bias incidents reported across the United States spiked in the 10 days following Donald Trump's presidential election victory, according a report released on Tuesday by a civil rights advocacy group.

The report, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, documents 867 incidents ranging from assaults to threatening graffiti messages, based on incidents reported to the group or by news media.

That is a major increase from the normal rate of hate incidents reported in the United States, said Richard Cohen, the group's president.


"What we're seeing is something quite unusual. People are reporting seeing swastikas painted in neighborhoods that they've lived in for 20 years. We've never seen anything like it," said Cohen, who has tracked hate groups for three decades.

The incidents included numerous cases of people threatening apparent immigrants with deportation and vandalism deriding black Americans, many of which cited Trump's victory.

They followed an historic presidential campaign in which the New York real estate developer vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, promised to deport millions of unregistered immigrants and mulled restricting Muslim immigration.

Since his victory, Trump has said he rejects acts of violence or harassment, and disavowed the so-called "alt-right" white nationalist movement, which has been a vocal supporter of the president-elect.

Cohen called on the Republican to do more.

"What we'd like to see Mr. Trump do is acknowledge that his own words have fueled the outbreak of hate that we're seeing. He needs to take responsibility and stop pretending he's surprised," Cohen said in a phone interview. "He needs to speak forcefully and repeatedly against bigotry."

A spokeswoman for Trump's transition office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump campaigned on a populist platform summed up in his "Make America Great Again" slogan and has vowed to be a more forceful advocate for the U.S. middle class in his negotiations on trade, security and other international issues than his predecessors.

The report found that close to one-third of the incidents that followed the Nov. 8 election represented anti-immigrant sentiments while about one in five were anti-black. Others targeted included lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, Muslims, Jews and women, while 23 incidents reflected anti-Trump feelings.

It cautioned that it was not able to verify the authenticity of each of the claims but said it had excluded those that had been disputed by authorities or the news media.

Donald Trump Flag-Burning Tweet Inflames, Distracts, Offends the Constitution

by Alex Emmons

 In an early morning tweet, Donald Trump declared that there “must be consequences” for people who burn the American flag, and proposed they should face a year in prison or even be stripped of their citizenship.

Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump

Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

Given Trump’s history of manipulating the news cycle with intentionally provocative tweets, it is difficult to know whether the tweet was a serious sign of his intentions to crack down on political dissent – or simply an attempt to incite left-wing critics and distract from other stories, like the recent coverage of his and his son-in-law’s extraordinary conflicts of interest.

But the tweet combines two deeply unconstitutional ideas long repudiated by the Supreme Court: criminalizing flag burning and stripping Americans of citizenship without their consent.

The Supreme Court struck down Texas’ prohibitions on flag burning in 1989, ruling that flag burning was a protected form of expression under the First Amendment.

Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan wrote “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

In response, Congress passed a federal law banning flag burning. And the Supreme Court struck it down in 1990.

Despite all this, prohibitions on flag burning have continued to enjoy support among members of both political parties, including former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. While a senator in 2005, Clinton co-sponsored a failed bill that would have made flag burning a crime, punishable by up to a year in jail or a $100,000 fine.

The Supreme Court also ruled in 1957 that citizens cannot be stripped of citizenship as punishment for a crime, and in 1967 ruled that citizens cannot be stripped of citizenship at all without their consent.

Again, despite that, expatriation proposals have drawn support from members of both parties.
In 2010, former Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who caucused with the Democrats, drafted a failed bill that would have stripped terror suspects of their citizenship — as a means of questioning them without their Miranda rights.

During his presidential run, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried to advance a bill that would strip Americans of their citizenship for the vague offense of providing “assistance” to a terrorist organization. An earlier version of Cruz’s bill in 2014 has a Democrat co-sponsor: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

Trump was possibly reacting to Fox News coverage on Monday of a protest at Hampshire College in Massachusetts earlier this month, where students allegedly burned a flag to protest Trump’s election victory.  Similar campus protests have taken place across the country. On November 9, for example, students at American University in Washington, D.C., burned a flag while carrying signs that said “Stand up to racism,” and “stand against anti-Muslim bigotry.”

Flag burning has a long history in the country as a form of protest, having being used to protest such things as the inauguration of Richard Nixon, and American intervention in Vietnam and El Salvador.
“One of the founding principles of American democracy is that we tolerate all peaceful forms of expression and dissent, said Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney with the ACLU. “That includes the right to desecrate and even burn the U.S. flag, as the Supreme Court has also held.”

Rowland added: “Our democracy is strong precisely because we tolerate dissent and peaceful expression of all kinds. The idea that not only would the government criminalize that but actually strip you of your citizenship is so very far from the ideals that are the firmament of our democracy that it’s an appalling suggestion.”

Trump’s hypocrisy is good for America

By Michael Gerson

As Donald Trump’s campaign promises have been dunked in reality’s strong solvent, many have been transformed in one way or another — modified, moderated, qualified, abandoned or pushed off into the distant future. Not a wall across the whole southern border. Not every part of Obamacare repealed. Not all illegal immigrants deported, at least in the foreseeable future. Not literally tearing up the Iran agreement. Not an actual prison cell for Hillary Clinton.

All this has opened up Trump to the charge of being a hypocrite. For the nation’s sake, let’s hope so. 

Hypocrisy has always been a complicated vice. It is the easiest, most common charge made in politics (“my opponent claims to love apple pie but uses them regularly in unspeakable acts”). Most of us feel a visceral reaction when a crusading prosecutor makes use of prostitutes, or a law-and-order judge takes bribes, or a moralizing pastor tends to his or her flock a little too closely. 

But we should take care in defining hypocrisy. “A hypocrite is a person who — but who isn’t?” said Don Marquis. More helpfully, British political scientist David Runciman says that hypocrisy involves “claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold.”

Hypocrisy comes in a long continuum of seriousness. You can wear a false face in displaying good manners toward someone you secretly despise. There is often hypocritical deception involved in political and diplomatic negotiations, which generally start with principled, nonnegotiable demands that are negotiated away in the process of finding a compromise. Hypocrisy can come in accommodating human realities that don’t quite fit our ideals, as in the widespread use of artificial birth control by American Catholics. Or it may be that you have simply changed your mind in light of new circumstances — as President George H.W. Bush did in violating the pledge “Read my lips: no new taxes.” 

In one sense, hypocrisy is unavoidable and necessary. If people were required, at all times, to live up to ideals of honesty, loyalty and compassion in order for those ideals to exist, there would be no ideals. Being a moral person is a struggle in which everyone repeatedly fails, becoming a hypocrite at each of those moments. A just and peaceful society depends on hypocrites who ultimately refuse to abandon the ideals they betray.

Before we become overly self-forgiving, it is worth recalling that the founder of Christianity took hypocrisy quite seriously: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.” Purity of heart and motivation, in the Christian tradition, does matter. But the hunt for hypocrisy should begin in the mirror. 

The issue at hand, however, is a certain kind of political hypocrisy — the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit. Most would concede that this type of hypocrisy is generally harmful for a democracy, in which self-government requires informed choices. Trump’s brand of personality-driven politics — emphasizing the virtues of a single leader — exaggerates the challenge. Trump arrives in Washington claiming to be the only honest man in a world of mendacity. It is a long way down from such a pedestal. 

Some of Trump’s strongest supporters seem to assume his cynicism. The part about forcing Mexicans to pay for the wall, according to Newt Gingrich, was “a great campaign device.” Of the largest construction project since the Qin dynasty, Rush Limbaugh now says he never expected Trump to do it. 

In this case, perhaps surprisingly, I am all for the wisdom of Gingrich and Limbaugh. Trump presents a special case, in which the normal criticisms of political hypocrisy should be suspended. Every time the Trump agenda is reshaped or refined to better fit reality, even Trump’s most dedicated critics have reason to applaud. 

This is a rare ethical circumstance in which realism and good sense take the form of hypocrisy. On a variety of issues, the sincerity of Trump’s current intentions — or the cynicism of his past intentions — should not matter. If the candidate who gave a wink and nod toward white nationalism now repudiates the alt-right and promises to “bring this country together,” so much the better. If the candidate who promised a trade war with China reconsiders, it is all to the good. 

It is admittedly an odd thing to cheer for cynicism. But in this strange, new political era, hypocrisy is our best hope. 

The Case Against Reality

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.
by Amanda Gefter

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.”


On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them. Experiment after experiment has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality. In short, all roads lead back to the observer. And that’s where you can find Hoffman—straddling the boundaries, attempting a mathematical model of the observer, trying to get at the reality behind the illusion. Quanta Magazine caught up with him to find out more.

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Gefter: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”

Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

Gefter: You’ve done computer simulations to show this. Can you give an example?

Hoffman: Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. 
Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality.

Gefter: But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?

Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

Gefter: So everything we see is one big illusion?

Hoffman: We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.

Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

Gefter: How did you first become interested in these ideas?

Hoffman: As a teenager, I was very interested in the question “Are we machines?” My reading of the science suggested that we are. But my dad was a minister, and at church they were saying we’re not. So I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. It’s sort of an important personal question—if I’m a machine, I would like to find that out! And if I’m not, I’d like to know, what is that special magic beyond the machine? So eventually in the 1980s I went to the artificial-intelligence lab at MIT and worked on machine perception. The field of vision research was enjoying a newfound success in developing mathematical models for specific visual abilities. I noticed that they seemed to share a common mathematical structure, so I thought it might be possible to write down a formal structure for observation that encompassed all of them, perhaps all possible modes of observation. I was inspired in part by Alan Turing. When he invented the Turing machine, he was trying to come up with a notion of computation, and instead of putting bells and whistles on it, he said, Let’s get the simplest, most pared down mathematical description that could possibly work. And that simple formalism is the foundation for the science of computation. So I wondered, could I provide a similarly simple formal foundation for the science of observation?

Gefter: A mathematical model of consciousness.

Hoffman: That’s right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains, tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so forth. So I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m doing. So I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

Gefter: But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

Gefter: The world is just other conscious agents?

Hoffman: I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.

Gefter: If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.

Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

Gefter: It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness?

Hoffman: I think it has been. Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”

Gefter: I suspect they’re reacting to things like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s model, where you still have a physical brain, it’s still sitting in space, but supposedly it’s performing some quantum feat. In contrast, you’re saying, “Look, quantum mechanics is telling us that we have to question the very notions of ‘physical things’ sitting in ‘space.’”

Hoffman: I think that’s absolutely true. The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including brains—don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.

Gefter: To return to the question you started with as a teenager, are we machines?

Hoffman: The formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is computationally universal—in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines—in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

This post appears courtesy of Quanta Magazine.

President Barack Obama Weekly Address November 24, 2016 (Audio/Transcript)

President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
November 24, 2016

Hi, everybody.  On behalf of the Obama family - Michelle, Malia, Sasha, Grandma, Bo, and Sunny - I want to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving.  Like so many of you, we'll spend the day with friends and family, turkey and touchdowns.  We'll give thanks for each other, and for all that God has given us.  And we'll reflect on what truly binds us as Americans.

That's never been more important.  As a country, we've just emerged from a noisy, passionate, and sometimes divisive campaign season. After all, elections are often where we emphasize what sets us apart.  We face off in a contest of "us" versus "them."  We focus on the candidate we support instead of some of the ideals we share.

But a few short weeks later, Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter our differences, we are still one people, part of something bigger than ourselves.  We are communities that move forward together.  We are neighbors who look out for one another, especially those among us with the least. We are always, simply, Americans.

That's why, through the fog of Civil War, President Lincoln saw what mattered most - the unalienable truths for which so many gave their lives, and which made possible "a new birth of freedom."  And so precisely when the fate of the Union hung in the balance, he boldly proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving, when the nation's gifts "should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people."

Today, we continue to give thanks for those blessings, and to all who ensured that they would be our inheritance. We remember the determined patriots who landed at the edge of the world in search of freedom.  We give thanks to the brave men and women who defend that freedom in every corner of the world.  And we honor all people - from the First Americans to our newest arrivals - who continue to shape our nation's story, enrich our heritage, and give meaning to our founding values, values we must never take for granted.  That in America, we are bound not by any one race or religion, but rather an adherence to a common belief - that all of us are created equal.  That we may think, worship, and speak, and love as we please.  That the gift of democracy is ours, and ours alone, to nurture and protect.

Never doubt, that is what makes us American - not where we come from, what we look like, or what faith we practice, but the ideals to which we pledge our allegiance.  It's about our capacity to live up to the creed as old as our founding: "E Pluribus Unum" - that out of many, we are one.  And as long as we continue to welcome the contributions of all people, as long as we stand up for each other, speak out for what is right, and stay true to these ideals - not just when it's easy, but when it's hard - then no one can ever take away our liberty.  Our best days will always be ahead.  And we will keep building a future where all of our children know the promise of America.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

How Much Mussolini Is There in Donald Trump?

 Can Donald Trump be called a fascist? His political rhetoric makes it tempting to lump him into that category. That, though, wouldn't be helpful.

By Dirk Kurbjuweit

If Donald Trump were a fascist and his regime governed as such, the likely outcome would be that America's true champions of democracy would ultimately dare a revolt in order to defend their freedom. The rest of the West, which stands universally for freedoms like democracy and human rights, would also have no choice but to support this insurrection, even if it turned into a civil war.

So is he a fascist? "Yes, a Trump presidency would bring fascism to America," conservative Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan wrote in May. "Trump is a fascist," SPIEGEL ONLINE columnist Jakob Augstein recently offered. "Trump is a media figure and a fascist of our times," Fred Turner, a communications researcher at Stanford University recently wrote for the German weekly Die Zeit. "This is surely the way fascism can begin," New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick wrote the day after Trump's election.

Fascism is both a historical and political term. Historically, it describes regimes from the first half of the 20th century in Europe that were authoritarian and had a high propensity for violence. Politically, it has been deployed ever since as a battle cry used to lump opponents into the same camp as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in an effort to discredit and silence them. Many perfectly democratic politicians have been blasted as fascists by the left without the slightest justification.

That is not what is happening here. Trump's unscrupulous behavior during the election campaign, his racism and his threat to jail Hillary Clinton (though apparently withdrawn this week) go well beyond what is acceptable in a democracy. No comparisons can be made to George W. Bush or to Ronald Reagan -- Trump is in a category of his own. Unless, of course, what we are seeing is fascism.


What Is Fascism?

If it is fascism, then it would be a disaster on a global scale. See above. But if it isn't fascism, it would be a defamation of Trump's voters to call it that, akin to accusing them of helping to bring a fascist to power and potentially driving them away from democracy forever. That's why we must exercise great care when using the term. What is fascism and how does it relate to Trump? Or to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party, the Freedom Party of Austria, France's Front National or Viktor Orbán in Hungary?

In February, fascism expert Robert Paxton told the online magazine Slate that Trump "even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out." There are also parallels when it comes to his treatment of women: Mussolini was accused of being addicted to sex (a charge, it must be said, that was never levelled at Hitler). At the political level, though, comparison is difficult because there are so many different ideas about what truly constitutes fascism.

Action française, which formed at the end of the 19th century, is considered Europe's first fascist organization. Mussolini's Italy became the first fascist country, followed by Hitler's National Socialist Germany. Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Portugal also developed regimes during the 1930s and 1940s that had fascist elements. But the differences between Nazi Germany and Francisco Franco's Spain were so great that it's difficult to mention them in the same breath. Franco was a dictator, but didn't seek control of his subjects' thoughts and private lives. He wasn't an imperialist and he didn't seek to eradicate Judaism.

One early definition comes from German historian Ernst Nolte, who wrote a fair amount of nonsense in his career but who was an undisputed expert on fascism. He described it as such: "Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy." It's a long-winded sentence and it provides little by way of orientation today, given that the Soviet Union no longer exists and Marxism is no longer considered be a real political adversary.


The Features of 'Ur-Fascism'
  
In the mid-1990s, when fear broke out over the possibility of a new fascism in Russia, novelist and scholar Umberto Eco defined elements of an "Ur-Fascism." The main question he posed at the time was this: Is there a way of defining fascism to make it recognizable during any period of time? Eco had experienced Mussolini's Italy as a boy and wrote about how he won an essay contest in 1942 on the subject "Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?" His answer? Yes, of course we should die. "I was a bright boy," he wrote in the 1995 article, which appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Should we die for Trump's glory and the immortal destiny of the United States? If this question is ever asked of American students, then they will, without a doubt, be living under fascism. In order to prevent his own experiences from happening again, Eco developed an early warning system including 14 different features that define Ur-Fascism -- a fascism test, as it were. It can be applied to Trump in terms of what is known about him politically, knowledge that comes primarily from the campaign.

"The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition," Eco begins. It has to do with the "primeval truth," the pseudo-religious "syncretistic" elements of a fascist movement. That's not a pronounced characteristic with Trump. He hails from the worlds of real estate development and reality TV, and thus far there haven't been any significant signs of religious or philosophical underpinnings to his movement. So that criterion, at least, does not apply.

Feature No. 2 is the "rejection of modernism," of capitalism, but also of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason -- the "Spirit of 1789," Eco wrote, in reference to the French Revolution. Trump is himself a capitalist, but politically he has shown a strong tendency towards the irrational and intemperate. No determination is yet possible on this point.


'Distrust of the Intellectual World'
 
Clearly applicable is feature three, which includes a "distrust of the intellectual world." In Trump's world, most intellectuals are considered to be part of the hated "Establishment."
Feature four for Eco is an entirely closed worldview that considers any disagreement to be "treason". That kind of worldview to which all must submit is not currently detectable in Trump.

In point five, he writes that Ur-Fascism "seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition." Here, it sounds as though Eco could have been writing directly about Trump, AfD or Marine Le Pen.

Point six states: "Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That was why one of the most typical features of historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups." It would be impossible to more aptly describe Trump's appeal to his voters.
Nationalism is the seventh point in Eco's list -- in other words, Trump in his purest form.

At the halfway point of Eco's symptoms of Ur-Fascism, it's clear that four of the criteria speak in favor of a fascism verdict, two are against it and one is undecided.

Point eight: "The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies." As a boy, Eco wrote, he was taught that the English ate five meals a day, "more frequently than the poor but sober Italians." He was also taught that Jews were disagreeably rich. Although Trump is said to be a billionaire, many of his supporters are driven by rage against an establishment they see as having enriched itself.

In identifying Ur-Fascism, point nine holds that "there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle." In other words, permanent warfare. That definitely has not been a part of Trump's message.

As for point 10, Eco says that Ur-Fascism reflects what he calls a "mass elitism." Those who are members of the movement, the party or the nation look down on everyone else. Surely some of Trump's white supporters disdain African Americans, but the feeling of indignity is still greater than the idea of superiority.

"The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die," Eco writes in point 11. Furthermore, everyone would be raised in this spirit. That doesn't apply.

Criterion number 12: The Ur-Fascist "transfers his will to power to sexual matters." That is true of Trump.

Point 13: "Whenever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism." That is at the core of right-wing populism. They like to claim that those in power in Washington, Berlin or Paris are out of touch with what "the people" want.



 

 

Trump turns to Washington lawyer to navigate legal, ethics issues

By Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland 


President-elect Donald Trump on Friday chose Washington insider Donald McGahn to be his White House counsel, giving him the job of untangling potential conflicts of interest that the New York businessman's presidency may present.

McGahn, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, had been the chief counsel of the Trump campaign and was one of the few members of the Republican establishment to embrace the outsider candidate.

While Trump during his campaign frequently promised to "drain the swamp" of the political establishment in Washington, McGahn has an extensive history in the capital, especially in conservative politics.

McGahn served for years as counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the arm of the Republican Party that oversees campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives.

During his time at the FEC, McGahn was an advocate for loosening restrictions on campaign spending and was widely praised for opening up more of the commission’s internal processes to the public.

Along with providing guidance on ethics issues, the White House Counsel's office advises the president on the legality of proposed executive orders and legislation passed by Congress and vets potential administration appointees, including Supreme Court justices.

“Don has a brilliant legal mind, excellent character and a deep understanding of constitutional law,” Trump said in a statement.

Trump, a businessman who has never held public office, has real estate and leisure holdings all over the world, sparking concerns that his investments could color his decision-making in office. Trump has said that he will hand over day-to-day responsibilities of running his company to his children, but he has resisted calls to place his assets in a blind trust.

Trump also has expressed interest in finding a way to bypass a federal anti-nepotism law in order to give his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a formal White House role.

When Trump met with President Barack Obama earlier this month, Obama advised Trump during their Oval Office chat that his White House counsel would be an important job.

Trump has vowed to reverse Obama’s executive orders in a number of areas, including immigration and gun control. He also must nominate someone to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. McGahn will be tasked with shepherding the nominee through confirmation hearings.

Trump, who is spending the Thanksgiving holiday weekend at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, also continued to round out his national security team on Friday, naming Kathleen Troia "K.T." McFarland, as his deputy national security adviser.

McFarland served in three Republican administrations and was an aide to Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. A strong backer of Trump during the election campaign, McFarland will work with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick as his national security adviser.


Neither position requires confirmation by the U.S Senate.

The appointments came amid reports that Trump’s aides are divided about his choice for secretary of state, with some preferring 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who harshly criticized Trump during the campaign, and others backing Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor.

Transition officials on Friday downplayed any internal tension, calling reports of discord “overblown.”

Officials said that after returning to New York, Trump will meet with several more potential cabinet picks on Monday, including John Allison, the former chief executive of BB&T Corp who has been mentioned as a possible choice for U.S. Treasury secretary, and Paul Atkins, a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump’s presidency, overseas business deals and relations with foreign governments could all become intertwined

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger

Days after Donald Trump’s election victory, a news agency in the former Soviet republic of Georgia reported that a long-stalled plan for a Trump-branded tower in a seaside Georgian resort town was now back on track.

Likewise, the local developer of a Trump Tower planned for ­Buenos Aires announced last week, three days after Trump spoke with Argentina’s president, that the long-delayed project was moving ahead.
Meanwhile, foreign government leaders seeking to speak with Trump have reached out to the president-elect through his overseas network of business partners, an unusually informal process for calls traditionally coordinated with the U.S. State Department.
 
All of it highlights the muddy new world that Trump’s election may usher in — a world in which his stature as the U.S. president, the status of his private ventures across the globe and his relationships with foreign business partners and the leaders of their governments could all become intertwined.

In that world, Trump could personally profit if his election gives a boost to his brand and results in its expansion overseas. His political rise could also enrich his overseas business partners — and, perhaps more significantly, enhance their statuses in their home countries and alter long-standing diplomatic traditions by establishing them as new conduits for public business.

It is also possible, of course, that a controversial presidency inflaming international opposition could cause damage to the brand.

Trump has done little to set boundaries between his personal and official business since winning the presidency.

He has indicated that his children may take over the business, but he has also appointed them to formal roles with his presidential transition and included daughter Ivanka on calls with world leaders.
And he has continued to offer signs that he may remain engaged, at least on some level, in his private ventures.

For instance, Trump took a break from selecting his Cabinet last week for a brief meeting in his Trump Tower office with the developers of a Trump project in Pune, India, shaking hands and posing for photos with the men. When asked about the meeting, Trump told the New York Times: “I mean, what am I going to say? ‘I’m not going to talk to you, I’m not going to take pictures’?”

Trump also acknowledged to the Times, after he received a congratulatory visit the weekend after the election from British politician Nigel Farage, that he “might have” encouraged the leader of the UK Independence Party to oppose offshore windmill farms, like one he has fought off the Scottish coast because he believes it will mar the view from his Trump Turnberry golf resort there.

Trump has reacted defensively to suggestions that his conversations about his private business are somehow inappropriate. He told the Times this week, “the law’s totally on my side. The president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

On Monday evening, he tweeted: “Prior to the election, it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!”

Ethics experts say that if Trump takes no action to distance himself from his business holdings, he is likely to face questions about whether he is pursuing policy in the national interest or for his own business advantage. It is also possible that Trump could run afoul of a constitutional provision prohibiting presidents from accepting favors, or “emoluments,” from foreign leaders.

Trump representatives did not respond to questions this week about his business interests in Argentina, Georgia or elsewhere.

It is unclear how much real progress Trump’s election has prompted for some of these foreign projects, several of which had stalled in recent years. Some of the promises of renewed activity could be the work of foreign partners who have paid for the use of his name and who may be looking to take advantage of the moment as a marketing opportunity.

The Trump project in Argentina, for instance, has not been issued new permits since Election Day, a city official in Buenos Aires said. But public reports that the project is moving ahead show how foreign developers could stand to benefit if their governments were to grease the skids for Trump-branded projects as a way to curry favor with the new American president.

In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri connected by phone with President-elect Trump and his daughter Ivanka on Nov. 14. Three days later, Trump’s development partner in Argentina, the YY Development Group, put out word that the $100 million project was moving forward, featuring on its website a South American news report touting the progress. “The magnate Donald Trump expands his ‘ultraexclusive’ towers in South America,” the story read.

The development firm’s chief executive, Felipe Yaryuri, has touted his personal relationship with the Trumps, particularly with Trump’s son Eric. He was in Trump campaign headquarters on election night, posting a photo of himself with Eric Trump and tweeting that he had breakfast with Eric Trump the day after the election. Again, Trump officials declined to respond to inquiries about the tweets.

Yaryuri declined to be interviewed but said in a statement that his company has filed permit requests with the city of Buenos Aires that are awaiting approval. A city official said the request was made earlier this year but that no determination had been made.

Macri, the president, denied reports in local media that Trump had mentioned the project to him in their post-election conversation. However, a spokesman confirmed that Macri had relied on the Trump business partner to put him in touch with the newly elected president, a sign of how the local developer’s stature has risen since the American election.

Entanglements between Trump’s business interests and his official relationships also appear possible in Georgia, a U.S. ally where many are fearful of Trump’s potential rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump swept into the Black Sea resort town of Batumi in 2012 and announced that a new luxury Trump Tower would soon rise from the empty field in which he stood with the country’s then-president.

Once scheduled to break ground in 2013, however, the project was halted by an economic downturn, a local land planning dispute and, some analysts said, the electoral defeat of then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a personal friend of Trump’s who had championed the deal.

In recent months, long-standing roadblocks to the project’s groundbreaking resolved without government assistance, said ­Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a U.S.-based partner working with the local developer, the Silk Road Group, which paid Trump a licensing fee to put his name on the building.
Rtskhiladze said the developers informed the Trump Organization in September or October that the project could now proceed. After Trump was elected, he said he emailed a congratulatory note to Trump’s adult children and to a top Trump Organization executive — and reiterated that developers are prepared to move forward. He said Trump executives have indicated the project is being “reevaluated,” as they discuss how his company will be operated after Trump takes office.

“We’re ready,” Rtskhiladze said. “We’re waiting for them to give us the green light.”

He said it would add distinction to the project to bear the name of the U.S. president.

“There’s only one word: Pride,” he said of how he would feel to help construct a building bearing Trump’s name. “What else can you possibly feel? You can’t even imagine it, and then suddenly it happens.”

Although the United States stood beside Georgia when it was invaded by Russia in 2008, leaders of the small nation fear that an ascendant Russia could escalate simmering hostilities. The current Georgian government is led by political rivals of Saakashvili’s, the president who brought Trump to Georgia in 2012 but who has since left the country.

Georgian officials antsy with Trump’s rhetoric on Russia and eager to forge their own good relationship with the new American president could be tempted to curry favor by pushing ahead with the proposed 47-story building bearing his name, predicted Lincoln Mitchell, an American expert on Georgian politics who served as a paid adviser to the current governing party in 2012.

“The gray areas Trump has between where his job as president ends and where his business interests begin, that’s normal in that part of the world. Renewing this deal, that’s just an obvious thing to do,” said Mitchell, who opposed Trump’s election, quitting his job this summer writing for the New York Observer, which is owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Indeed, on Georgian state television last week, a U.S.-based Georgian real estate entrepreneur enthusiastically predicted that Trump’s win would mean a new era of economic cooperation and growth for both countries. In a separate interview with The Washington Post, the entrepreneur, Roman Bokeria, expressed optimism that a new Trump Tower would soon rise in Batumi.

“Cutting the ribbon on a new Trump Tower in Georgia will be a symbol of victory for all of the free world,” said Bokeria, chief executive of Miami Red Square Realty.

Rtskhiladze said the project will move forward based only on the “attractive business case” that can be made for it, not any government intervention.

While Trump and his advisers have noted that U.S. conflict of interest and gift laws do not apply to the president, a bipartisan group of ethics experts has emphasized that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the president from accepting favors — emoluments is the constitutional term — from foreign leaders.

“It appears from the reports we’re seeing this week that Donald Trump may be opening up a wholesale emoluments business,” said Norm Eisen, former White House ethics counsel to President Obama, who is joining with colleagues from both parties to sound an alarm about the perils of Trump’s business holdings.

“The pattern we are seeing this week of stalled Trump projects jump-starting and the president-elect himself conceding that he may have raised business issues with a foreign official is stunning,” he said.

President Obama Awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom (Video/Transcript)

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, hello, hello!  Hey!  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Thank you so much.  Thank you.  Everybody, please have a seat.  We’ve got some work to do here.  (Laughter.)  This is not all fun and games.

Welcome to the White House, everybody.  Today, we celebrate extraordinary Americans who have lifted our spirits, strengthened our union, pushed us toward progress.

I always love doing this event, but this is a particularly impressive class.  We've got innovators and artists.  Public servants, rabble rousers, athletes, renowned character actors -- like the guy from Space Jam.  (Laughter.)  We pay tribute to those distinguished individuals with our nation's highest civilian honor -- the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about each of them.

First, we came close to missing out on Bill and Melinda Gates' incredible partnership.  Because apparently Bill's opening line was, "Do you want to go out two weeks from this coming Saturday?"  (Laughter.)  He’s good with computers, but -- (laughter.) 
Fortunately, Melinda believes in second chances.  And the world is better for it.  For two decades, the Gates Foundation has worked to provide lifesaving medical care to millions -- boosting clean water supplies, improving education for our children, rallying aggressive international action on climate change, cutting childhood mortality in half.  The list could go on.

These two have donated more money to charitable causes than anyone, ever.  Many years ago, Melinda's mom told her an old saying: "To know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived -- that is success."  By this and just about any other measure, few in human history have been more successful than these two impatient optimists.

Frank Gehry has never let popular acclaim reverse his impulse to defy convention.  "I was an outsider from the beginning," he says, "so for better or worse, I thrived on it."  The child of poor Jewish immigrants, Frank grew up in Los Angeles, and throughout his life he embraced the spirit of a city defined by an open horizon.  He's spent his life rethinking shapes and mediums, seemingly the force of gravity itself; the idea of what architecture could be he decided to upend -- constantly repurposing every material available, from titanium to a paper towel tube.  He's inspiring our next generation through his advocacy for arts education in our schools.  From the Guggenheim, to Bilbao, to Chicago's Millennium Park -- our hometown -- to his home in Santa Monica, which I understand caused some consternation among his neighbors -- (laughter) -- Frank's work teaches us that while buildings may be sturdy and fixed to the ground, like all great art, they can lift our spirits.  They can soar and broaden our horizons.

When an undergraduate from rural Appalachia first set foot on the National Mall many years ago, she was trying to figure out a way to show that "war is not just a victory or a loss," but "about individual lives."  She considered how the landscape might shape that message, rather than the other way around.  The project that Maya Lin designed for her college class earned her a B+ -- (laughter) -- and a permanent place in American history.  (Laughter.)  So all of you B+ students out there.  (Laughter.)
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism, and ourselves.  Maya has given us more than just places for remembering -- she has created places for us to make new memories.  Her sculptures, chapels, and homes are "physical act[s] of poetry," each reminding us that the most important element in art or architecture is human emotion.

Three minutes before Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon, Apollo 11's lunar lander alarms triggered -- red and yellow lights across the board.  Our astronauts didn't have much time.  But thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.  A young MIT scientist -- and a working mom in the ‘60s -- Margaret led the team that created the onboard flight software that allowed the Eagle to land safely.  And keep in mind that, at this time, software engineering wasn't even a field yet.  There were no textbooks to follow, so, as Margaret says, "There was no choice but to be pioneers."

Luckily for us, Margaret never stopped pioneering.  And she symbolizes the generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space.  Her software architecture echoes in countless technologies today.  And her example speaks of the American spirit of discovery that exists in every little girl and little boy who know that somehow, to look beyond the heavens is to look deep within ourselves -- and to figure out just what is possible.

If Wright is flight and Edison is light, then Hopper is code.  Born in 1906, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper followed her mother into mathematics, earned her PhD from Yale, and set out on a long and storied career.  At age 37, and a full 15 pounds below military guidelines, the gutsy and colorful Grace joined the Navy and was sent to work on one of the first computers, Harvard's "Mark One."

She saw beyond the boundaries of the possible, and invented the first compiler, which allowed programs to be written in regular language and then translated for computers to understand.  While the women who pioneered software were often overlooked, the most prestigious award for young computer scientists now bear her name.  From cell phones to cyber command, we can thank Grace Hopper for opening programming to millions more people, helping to usher in the information age and profoundly shaping our digital world.

Speaking of really smart people -- (laughter) -- in the summer of 1950, a young University of Chicago physicist found himself at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Dick Garwin was there, he said, because Chicago paid its faculty for nine months but his family ate for 12.  So by the next summer, Dick had helped create the hydrogen bomb.  And for the rest of his life, he dedicated himself to reducing the threat of nuclear war.  Dick's not only an architect of the atomic age.  Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve.  Reconnaissance satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touchscreen all bear his fingerprints.  He even patented a "mussel washer" for shellfish -- which I haven’t used.  The other stuff I have.  (Laughter.)  Where is he?

Dick has advised nearly every President since Eisenhower -- often rather bluntly.  Enrico Fermi -- also a pretty smart guy himself -- is said to have called Dick "the only true genius" he ever met.  I do want to see this mussel washer.  (Laughter.)

Along with these scientists, artists, and thinkers, we also honor those who have shaped our culture from the stage and the screen.

In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the whole course history.  Cicely was never the likeliest of Hollywood stars.  The daughter of immigrants from the West Indies, she was raised by a hardworking and religious mother who cleaned houses and forbade her children to attend the movies.  But once she got her education and broke into the business, Cicely made a conscious decision not just to say lines, but to speak out.  "I would not accept roles," she said, "unless they projected us, particularly women, in a realistic light, [and] dealt with us as human beings."  And from "Sounder," to "The Trip to Bountiful," to "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Cicely's convictions and grace have helped for us see the dignity of every single beautiful member of the American family.  And she’s just gorgeous.  (Laughter and applause.)  Yes, she is.

In 1973, a critic wrote of Robert De Niro, "This kid doesn't just act -- he takes off into the vapors."  And it was true, his characters are iconic.  A Sicilian father turned New York mobster.  A mobster who runs a casino.  A mobster who needs therapy.  (Laughter.)  A father-in-law who is scarier than a mobster.  (Laughter.)  Al Capone -- a mobster.  (Laughter.)

Robert combines dramatic precision and, it turns out, comedic timing with his signature eye for detail.  And while the name De Niro is synonymous with "tough guy," his true gift is the sensitivity that he brings to each role.  This son of New York artists didn't stop at becoming one of the world's greatest actors.  He's also a director, a philanthropist, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival.  Of his tireless preparation -- from learning the saxophone to remaking his body -- he once said, "I feel I have to earn the right to play a part."  And the result is honest and authentic art that reveals who we really are.

In 1976, Lorne Michaels implored the Beatles to reunite on his brand new show.  In exchange, he offered them $3,000.  (Laughter.)  And then he told them they could share it equally, or they could give Ringo a smaller cut.  (Laughter.)  Which was early proof that Lorne Michaels has a good sense of humor.

On Saturday Night Live, he's created a world where a band of no-names become comedy's biggest stars.  Where our friends the Coneheads, and cheerleaders, and land sharks, and basement deadbeats, and motivational speakers, and an unfrozen caveman lawyer show up, and Tom Hanks is on "Black Jeopardy."  (Laughter.)  After four decades, even in this fractured media culture that we’ve got, SNL remains appointment viewing; a mainline into not just our counterculture but our culture; still a challenge to the powerful, especially folks like me.

And yet even after all these years, Lorne jokes that his tombstone should bear just a single word that's often found in the show's reviews -- "uneven."  (Laughter.)  As a current U.S. Senator would say:  Doggone it, Lorne - that's why people like you.  He produced a Senator, too, that’s pretty impressive.
Ellen DeGeneres has a way of making you laugh about something rather than at someone.  Except when I danced on her show -- she laughed at me.  (Laughter.)  But that’s okay.

It's easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law -- just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago.  Just how important it was not just to the LGBT community, but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice.

What an incredible burden that was to bear.  To risk your career like that.  People don’t do that very often.  And then to have the hopes of millions on your shoulders.  But it's like Ellen says:  We all want a tortilla chip that can support the weight of guacamole.  Which really makes no sense to me, but I thought would brighten the mood, because I was getting kind of choked up.  (Laughter.)  And she did pay a price -- we don’t remember this.  I hadn’t remembered it.  She did, for a pretty long stretch of time -- even in Hollywood.

And yet, today, every day, in every way, Ellen counters what too often divides us with the countless things that bind us together -- inspires us to be better, one joke, one dance at a time.

When The Candidate wins his race in the iconic 1972 film of the same name, which continues, by the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it, and many of you are too young -- perhaps the best movie about what politics is actually like, ever.  He famously asks his campaign manager the reflective and revealing question:  "What do we do now?"  And like the man he played in that movie, Robert Redford has figured it out and applied his talent and charm to achieve success.

We admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next.  He created a platform for independent filmmakers with the Sundance Institute.  He has supported our National Parks and our natural resources as one of the foremost conservationists of our generation.  He's given his unmatched charisma to unforgettable characters like Roy Hobbs, Nathan Muir, and of course the Sundance Kid, entertaining us for more than half a century.  As an actor, director, producer, and as an advocate, he has not stopped -- and apparently drives so fast that he had breakfast in Napa and dinner in Salt Lake.  (Laughter.)  At 80 years young, Robert Redford has no plans to slow down.

According to a recent headline, the movie, Sully was the last straw.  We should never travel with Tom Hanks.  (Laughter.)  I mean, you think about, you got pirates, plane crashes, you get marooned in airport purgatory, volcanoes -- something happens with Tom Hanks.  (Laughter.)  And yet somehow, we can't resist going where he wants to take us.  He's been an accidental witness to history, a crusty women's baseball manager, an everyman who fell in love with Meg Ryan three times.  (Laughter.)  Made it seem natural to have a volleyball as your best friend.  From a Philadelphia courtroom, to Normandy's beachheads, to the dark side of the moon, he has introduced us to America's unassuming heroes.

Tom says he just saw "ordinary guys who did the right thing at the right time."  Well, it takes one to know one, and "America's Dad" has stood up to cancer with his beloved wife, Rita.  He has championed our veterans, supported space exploration, and the truth is, Tom has always saved his best roles for real life.  He is a good man -- which is the best title you can have.

So we got innovators, entertainers -- three more folks who've dedicated themselves to public service.
In the early 1960s, thousands of Cuban children fled to America, seeking an education they'd never get back home.  And one refugee was 15-year-old named Eduardo Padron, whose life changed when he enrolled at Miami Dade College.  That decision led to a bachelor's degree, then a Master's degree, then a PhD, and then he had a choice -- he could go into corporate America, or he could give back to his alma mater.  And Eduardo made his choice -- to create more stories just like his.

As Miami Dade's President since 1995, Dr. Padron has built a "dream factory" for one of our nation's most diverse student bodies -- 165,000 students in all.  He's one of the world's preeminent education leaders -- thinking out of the box, supporting students throughout their lives, embodying the belief that we're only as great as the doors we open.  Eduardo's example is one we all can follow -- a champion for those who strive for the same American Dream that first drew him to our shores.

When Elouise Cobell first filed a lawsuit to recover lands and money for her people, she didn't set out to be a hero.  She said, "I just wanted…to give justice to people that didn't have it."  And her lifelong quest to address the mismanagement of American Indian lands, resources, and trust funds wasn't about special treatment, but the equal treatment at the heart of the American promise.  She fought for almost 15 years -- across three Presidents, seven trials, 10 appearances before a federal appeals court.  All the while, she traveled the country some 40 weeks a year, telling the story of her people.  And in the end, this graduate of a one-room schoolhouse became a MacArthur Genius.  She is a proud daughter of Montana's Blackfeet Nation.  Reached ultimately a historic victory for all Native Americans.  Through sheer force of will and a belief that the truth will win out, Elouise Cobell overcame the longest odds, reminding us that fighting for what is right is always worth it.

Now, every journalist in the room, every media critic knows the phrase Newt Minow coined: the "vast wasteland."  But the two words Newt prefers we remember from his speech to the nation's broadcasters are these: "public interest."  That's been the heartbeat of his life's work -- advocating for residents of public housing, advising a governor and Supreme Court justice, cementing presidential debates as our national institution, leading the FCC.

When Newt helped launch the first communications satellites, making nationwide broadcasts possible -- and eventually GPS possible and cellphones possible -- he predicted it would be more important than the moon landing.  "This will launch ideas into space," he said, "and ideas last longer than people."  As far as I know, he's the only one of today's honorees who was present on my first date with Michelle.  (Laughter.)  Imagine our surprise when we saw Newt, one of our bosses that summer, at the movie theater -- Do the Right Thing.  So he's been vital to my personal interests.  (Laughter.)
And finally, we honor five of the all-time greats in sports and music.

The game of baseball has a handful of signature sounds.  You hear the crack of the bat.  You got the crowd singing in the seventh inning stretch.  And you’ve got the voice of Vin Scully.  Most fans listen to a game's broadcast when they can't be at the ballpark.  Generations of Dodger fans brought their radios into the stands because you didn't want to miss one of Vin's stories.

Most play-by-play announcers partner with an analyst in the booth to chat about the action.  Vin worked alone and talked just with us.  Since Jackie Robinson started at second base, Vin taught us the game and introduced us to its players.  He narrated the improbable years, the impossible heroics, turned contests into conversations.  When he heard about this honor, Vin asked with characteristic humility, "Are you sure?  I'm just an old baseball announcer."  And we had to inform him that to Americans of all ages, you are an old friend.  In fact, I thought about him doing all these citations, which would have been very cool, but I thought we shouldn’t make him sing for his supper like that.  (Laughter.)  “Up next” -- (Laughter.)

Here's how great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was:  1967, he had spent a year dominating college basketball, the NCAA bans the dunk.  They'd didn’t say it was about Kareem, but it was about Kareem.  (Laughter.)  When a sport changes its rules to make it harder just for you, you are really good.  (Laughter and applause.)  And yet despite the rule change, he was still the sport's most unstoppable force.  It's a title he'd hold for more than two decades, winning NBA Finals MVPs a staggering 14 years apart.  (Someone sneezes.)  Bless you.  (Laughter.)

And as a surprisingly similar-looking co-pilot, Roger Murdoch, once said in the movie, Airplane -- I mean, we’ve got some great actors here -- Space Jam, Airplane.  (Laughter.)  He did it all while dragging Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.  But the reason we honor Kareem is more than just a pair of goggles and the skyhook.  He stood up for his Muslim faith when it wasn't easy and it wasn’t popular.  He's as comfortable sparring with Bruce Lee as he is advocating on Capitol Hill or writing with extraordinary eloquence about patriotism.  Physically, intellectually, spiritually -- Kareem is one-of-a-kind -- an American who illuminates both our most basic freedoms and our highest aspirations.

When he was five years old, Michael Jordan nearly cut off his big toe with an axe.  (Laughter.)  Back then, his handles needed a little work.  But think -- if things had gone differently, Air Jordan just might never have taken flight.  (Laughter.)  I mean, you don’t want to buy a shoe with one toe missing.  (Laughter.)  We may never have seen him switch hands in mid-air against the Lakers.  Or drop 63 in the Garden.  Or gut it out in the flu game.  Or hit "the shot" three different times -- over Georgetown, over Ehlo, over Russell.  We might not have seen him take on Larry Bird in H-O-R-S-E or lift up the sport globally along with the Dream Team.

Yet MJ is still more than those moments; more than just the best player on the two greatest teams of all time -- the Dream Team and the Chicago '96 Bulls.  He's more than a logo, more than just an Internet meme.  (Laughter.)  More than just a charitable donor or a business owner committed to diversity.  There is a reason you call someone "the Michael Jordan of" -- Michael Jordan of neurosurgery, or the Michael Jordan of rabbis, or the Michael Jordan of outrigger canoeing -- and they know what you're talking about.  Because Michael Jordan is the Michael Jordan of greatness.  He is the definition of somebody so good at what they do that everybody recognizes them.  That’s pretty rare.

As a child, Diana Ross loved singing and dancing for family friends -- but not for free.  (Laughter.)  She was smart enough to pass the hat.  And later, in Detroit's Brewster housing projects, she met Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard.  Their neighbor, Smokey Robinson, put them in front of Berry Gordy -- and the rest was magic -- music history.  The Supremes earned a permanent place in the American soundtrack.

Along with her honey voice, her soulful sensibility, Diana exuded glamour and grace that filled stages that helped to shape the sound of Motown.  On top of becoming one of the most successful recording artists of all time, raised five kids -- somehow found time to earn an Oscar nomination for acting.  Today, from the hip-hop that samples her, to the young singers who've been inspired by her, to the audiences that still cannot get enough of her -- Diana Ross's influence is inescapable as ever.

He was sprung from a cage out on Highway 9.  A quiet kid from Jersey, just trying to make sense of the temples of dreams and mystery that dotted his hometown -- pool halls, bars, girls and cars, altars and assembly lines.  And for decades, Bruce Springsteen has brought us all along on a journey consumed with the bargains between ambition and injustice, and pleasure and pain; the simple glories and scattered heartbreak of everyday life in America.

To create one of his biggest hits, he once said, "I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth…the last one you'd ever need to hear.  One glorious noise…then the apocalypse."  Every restless kid in America was given a story: "Born to Run."

He didn't stop there.  Once he told us about himself, he told us about everybody else.  The steelworker in "Youngstown."  The Vietnam Vet in "Born in the USA."  The sick and the marginalized on "The Streets of Philadelphia."  The firefighter carrying the weight of a reeling but resilient nation on "The Rising."  The young soldier reckoning with "Devils and Dust" in Iraq.  The communities knocked down by recklessness and greed in the "Wrecking Ball."  All of us, with all our faults and our failings, every color, and class, and creed, bound together by one defiant, restless train rolling toward "The Land of Hope and Dreams."  These are all anthems of our America; the reality of who we are, and the reverie of who we want to be.

"The hallmark of a rock and roll band," Bruce Springsteen once said, is that "the narrative you tell together is bigger than anyone could have told on your own."  And for decades, alongside the Big Man, Little Steven, a Jersey girl named Patti, and all the men and women of the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen has been carrying the rest of us on his journey, asking us all "what is the work for us to do in our short time here."

I am the President.  But he is The Boss.  (Laughter.)  And pushing 70, he's still laying down four-hour live sets -- if you have been at them, he is working.  "Fire-breathing rock 'n' roll."  So I thought twice about giving him a medal named for freedom because we hope he remains, in his words, a "prisoner of rock 'n' roll" for years to come.

So, I told you, this is like a really good class.  (Laughter.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to give it up for the recipients of the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom.  (Applause.)  It is a good group.

All right.  Now we actually got to give them medals.  So please be patient.  We are going to have my military aide read the citations.  Each one of them will come up and receive the medals, and then we’ll wrap up the program.
Okay.  Let’s hit it.

MILITARY AIDE:  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  (Applause.)  An iconic basketball player who revolutionized the sport with his all-around play and signature skyhook, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a 19-time All-Star, a 6-time world champion, and the leading scorer in NBA history.  Adding to his achievements on the court he also left his mark off of it, advocating for civil rights, cancer research, science education, and social justice.  In doing so, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leaves a towering legacy of compassion, faith, and service to others -- a legacy based not only on the strength and grace of his athleticism, but on the sharpness of his mind and the size of his heart.  (Applause.)

Turk Cobell, accepting on behalf of his mother, Elouise C. Cobell Yellowbird Woman.  (Applause.)  A member of the Blackfeet Nation, Elouise Cobell spent her life defying the odds and working on behalf of her people.  As a young woman, she was told that she wasn’t capable of understanding accounting.  So she mastered the field -- and used her expertise to champion a lawsuit whose historic settlement has helped restore Tribal homelands to her beloved Blackfeet Nation and many other Tribes.  Today, her tenacious and unwavering spirit lives on in the thousands of people and hundreds of Tribes for whom she fought and in all those she taught to believe that it is never too late to right the wrongs of the past and help shape a better future.  (Applause.)

Ellen DeGeneres.  (Applause.)  In a career spanning three decades, Ellen DeGeneres has lifted our spirits and brought joy to our lives as a stand-up comic, actor, and television star.  In every role, she reminds us to be kind to one another and to treat people as each of us wants to be treated.  At a pivotal moment, her courage and candor helped change the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, accelerating our Nation’s constant drive toward equality and acceptance for all.  Again and again, Ellen DeGeneres has shown us that a single individual can make the world a more fun, more open, more loving place -- so long as we “just keep swimming.”  (Applause.)

Robert De Niro.  (Applause.)  For over 50 years, Robert De Niro has delivered some of screen’s most memorable performances, cementing his place as one of the most gifted actors of his generation.  From “The Godfather Part II” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Midnight Run” and “Heat,” his work is legendary for its range and depth.  Relentlessly committed to his craft, De Niro embodies his characters, creating rich, nuanced portraits that reflect the heart of the human experience.  Regardless of genre or era, Robert De Niro continues to demonstrate that extraordinary skill that has made him one of America’s most revered and influential artists.  (Applause.)

Richard L. Garwin.  (Applause.)  One of the most renowned scientific and engineering minds of our time, Dr. Richard Garwin has always answered the call to help solve society’s most challenging problems.  He has coupled his pioneering work in defense and intelligence technologies with leadership that underscores the urgency for humanity to control the spread of nuclear arms.  Through his advice to Republican and Democratic administrations dating to President Eisenhower, his contributions in fundamental research, and his inventions that power technologies that drive our modern world, Richard Garwin has contributed not only to this Nation’s security and prosperity, but to the quality of life for people all over the world.  (Applause.)

William H. Gates III and Melinda French Gates.  (Applause.)  Few people have had the profound global impact of Bill and Melinda Gates.  Through their work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they’ve demonstrated how the most capable and fortunate among us have a responsibility to use their talents and resources to tackle the world’s greatest challenges.  From helping women and girls lift themselves and their families out of poverty to empowering young minds across America, they have transformed countless lives with their generosity and innovation.  Bill and Melinda Gates continue to inspire us with their impatient optimism that, together, we can remake the world as it should be.  (Applause.)

Frank Gehry.  (Applause.)  Never limited by conventional materials, styles, or processes, Frank Gehry’s bold and thoughtful structures demonstrate architecture’s power to induce wonder and revitalize communities.  A creative mind from an early age, he began his career by building imaginary homes and cities with scrap material from his grandfather’s hardware store.  Since then, his work continues to strike a balance between experimentation and functionality, resulting in some of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings.  From his pioneering use of technology to the dozens of awe-inspiring sites that bear his signature style to his public service as a citizen artist through his work with Turnaround Arts, Frank Gehry has proven himself an exemplar scholar of American innovation.  (Applause.)

Margaret Heafield Hamilton.  (Applause.)  A pioneer in technology, Margaret Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history.  Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.  She broke barriers in founding her own software businesses, revolutionizing an industry and inspiring countless women to participate in STEM fields.  Her love of exploration and innovation are the source code of the American spirit, and her genius has inspired generations to reach for the stars.  (Applause.)

Thomas J. Hanks.  (Applause.)  Throughout a distinguished film career, Tom Hanks has revealed the character of America, as well as his own.  Portraying war heroes, an astronaut, a ship captain, a cartoon cowboy, a young man growing up too fast, and dozens of others, he’s allowed us to see ourselves -- not only as we are, but as we aspire to be.  On screen and off, Tom Hanks has honored the sacrifices of those who have served our Nation, called on us all to think big and to believe, and inspired a new generation of young people to reach for the sky.  (Laughter and applause.)

Deborah Murray, accepting on behalf of her great aunt, Grace Murray Hopper.  (Applause.)  As a child who loved disassembling alarm clocks, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper found her calling early.  A Vassar alumna with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, Hopper served in the Navy during World War II, becoming one of the first programmers in early computing.  Known today as the “Queen of Code,” Grace Hopper’s work helped make the coding language more practical and accessible.  She invented the first compiler, or translator, a fundamental element of our now digital world.  “Amazing Grace” was committed to making the language of computer programming more universal.  Today, we honor her contributions to computer science and the sense of possibility she inspired in generations of young people.  (Applause.)

Michael J. Jordan.  (Applause and laughter.)  Powered by a drive to compete that earned him every major award in basketball, including six NBA championships, five Most Valuable Player awards, and two gold medals, Michael Jordan has a name that’s become a synonym for excellence.  His wagging tongue and high-flying dunks redefined the game, making him a global superstar whose impact transcended basketball and shaped our Nation’s broader culture.  From the courts in Wilmington, Chapel Hill, and Chicago to the owner’s suite he occupies today, his life and example have inspired millions of Americans to strive to “Be Like Mike.”  (Applause.)

Maya Y. Lin.  (Applause.)  Boldly challenging our understanding of the world, Maya Lin’s designs have brought people of all walks of life together in spirits of remembrance, introspection, and humility.  The manipulation of natural terrain and topography within her works inspires us to bridge our differences and recognize the gravity of our collective existence.  Her pieces have changed the landscape of our country and influenced the dialogue of our society -- never more profoundly than with her tribute to the Americans who fell in Vietnam by cutting a wound into the Earth to create a sacred place of healing in our Nation’s capital.  (Applause.)

Lorne Michaels.  (Applause.)  One of the most transformative entertainment figures of our time, Lorne Michaels followed his dreams to New York City, where he created a sketch show that brought satire, wits, and modern comedy to homes around the world.  Under his meticulous command as executive producer, “Saturday Night Live” has entertained audiences across generations, reflecting -- and shaping -- critical elements of our cultural, political, and national life.  Lorne Michaels’ creative legacy stretches into late-night television, sitcoms, and the big screen, making us laugh, challenging us to think, and raising the bar for those who follow.  As one of his show’s signature characters would say, “Well, isn’t that special?”  (Laughter and applause.)

Newton N. Minow.  (Applause.)  As a soldier, counsel to the Governor of Illinois, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and law clerk to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Newton Minow’s career has been defined by his devotion to others.  Deeply committed to his family, the law, and the American people, his dedication to serving and empowering the public is reflected in his efforts to ensure that broadcast media educates and provides opportunity for all.  Challenging the media to better serve their viewers, his staunch commitment to the power of ideas and information has transformed telecommunications and its influential role in our society.  (Applause.)

Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón.  (Applause.)  As a teenage refugee from Cuba, Eduardo Padrón came to the United States to pursue the American Dream, and he has spent his life making that dream real for others.  As president of the community college he once attended, his thoughtful leadership and commitment to education have transformed Miami Dade College into one of the premier learning institutions in the country, earning him praise around the world.  His personal story and lasting professional influence prove that success need not be determined by our background, but by our dedication to others and our passion for creating America that is as inclusive as it is prosperous.  (Applause.)

Robert Redford.  (Applause.)  Robert Redford has captivated audiences from both sides of the camera through entertaining motion pictures that often explore vital social, political, and historical themes.  His lifelong advocacy on behalf of preserving our environment will prove as an enduring legacy as his award-winning films, as will his pioneering support for independent filmmakers across America.  His art and activism continue to shape our Nation’s cultural heritage, inspiring millions to laugh, cry, think, and change.  (Applause.)

Diana Ross.  (Applause and laughter.)  A daughter of Detroit, Diana Ross helped create the sound of Motown with her iconic voice.  From her groundbreaking work with The Supremes to a solo career that has spanned decades, she has influenced generations of young artists and shaped our Nation’s musical landscape.  In addition to a GRAMMY© Lifetime Achievement Award and countless musical accolades, Diana Ross has distinguished herself as an actor, earning an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award.  With over 25 albums, unforgettable hit singles, and live performances that continue to captivate audiences around the world, Diana Ross still reigns supreme.  (Applause.)
Next up, Vin Scully.  (Laughter and applause.)  With a voice that transcended a sport and transformed a profession, Vin Scully narrated America’s pastime for generations of fans.  Known to millions as the soundtrack of summer, he found time to teach us about life and love while chronicling routine plays and historic heroics.  In victory and in defeat, his colorful accounts reverberated through the bleachers, across the airwaves, and into our homes and imaginations.  He is an American treasure and a beloved storyteller, and our country’s gratitude for Vin Scully is as profound as his love for the game.  (Applause.)

Bruce F. Springsteen.  (Applause.)  As a songwriter, a humanitarian, America’s Rock and Roll laureate, and New Jersey’s greatest ambassador, Bruce Springsteen is, quite simply, The Boss.  (Laughter.)  Through stories about ordinary people, from Vietnam veterans to steel workers, his songs capture the pain and the promise of the American experience.  With his legendary E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen leaves everything on stage in epic, communal live performances that have rocked audiences for decades.  With empathy and honesty, he holds up a mirror to who we are -- as Americans chasing our dreams, and as human beings trying to do the right thing.  There’s a place for everyone in Bruce Springsteen’s America.  (Applause.)

Cicely Tyson.  (Applause.)  For sixty years, Cicely Tyson has graced the screen and the stage, enlightening us with her groundbreaking characters and calls to conscience, humility, and hope.  Her achievements as an actor, her devotion to her faith, and her commitment to advancing equality for all Americans—especially women of color -- have touched audiences of multiple generations.  From “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” to “Sounder,” to “The Trip to Bountiful,” Cicely Tyson’s performances illuminate the character of our people and the extraordinary possibilities of America.  (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT:  So, just on a personal note, part of the reason that these events are so special to me is because everybody on this stage has touched me in a very powerful, personal way -- in ways that they probably couldn’t imagine.  Whether it was having been inspired by a song, or a game, or a story, or a film, or a monument, or in the case of Newt Minow introducing me to Michelle -- (laughter) -- these are folks who have helped make me who I am and think about my presidency, and what also makes them special is, this is America.

And it’s useful when you think about this incredible collection of people to realize that this is what makes us the greatest nation on Earth.  Not because of what we -- (applause.)  Not because of our differences, but because, in our difference, we find something common to share.  And what a glorious thing that is.  What a great gift that is to America.

So I want all of you to enjoy the wonderful reception that will be taking place afterwards.  Michelle and I have to get back to work, unfortunately, but I hear the food is pretty good.  (Laughter.)  And I would like all of you to give one big rousing round of applause to our 2016 honorees for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Give it up.  (Applause.)