Trump ally Angela Stanton-King loses Georgia House race with less than 15% of the vote

Nikema Williams defeated Angela Stanton-King with almost 84% of the vote for the seat once held by the late Rep. John Lewis

Stephanie Guerilus,
TheGrio•November 4, 2020

Nikema Williams defeated Angela Stanton-King in a landslide victory in the race for the late Congressman John Lewis’ seat in Georgia.

Williams won the seat with 85.1% of votes to Stanton’s 14.9%, The New York Times reports. The landslide victory was by a margin of 71%. It wasn’t a close contest despite the oversized importance it had after Lewis‘s death in July from pancreatic cancer at the age of 80. The Georgia lawmaker had served in the House of Representatives since 1987.

Democrats chose Williams to run for the 5th Congressional district after Lewis passed. Georgia’s 39th district senator campaigned on a platform of “good trouble,” invoking Lewis’ creed and promising to “protect his legacy.” She vowed to fight for Medicare for All, universal family care, and against rampant voter suppression tactics.

(Credit: Georgia State Senate, Getty Images and Stanton-King)

“I’m committed to fighting for you and I’m committed to bringing your voices with me to the halls of Congress,” she said in a campaign ad she tweeted to supporters last month

Stanton-King, a staunch Republican and founder  of the American King Foundation, blasted the Democrats for what she believed was poor leadership. She pilloried the party for fostering an environment of lawlessness and accused Williams of feeling “entitled” to the seat. Stanton-King’s platform prioritized a pro-life agenda and her support of President Donald Trump.

Both women were less than impressed with the other, resulting in no debates taking place between them. Williams said she wouldn’t agree to one as she believed that Stanton-King was spreading lies on social media.

“I’m not going to give her a platform,” Williams said in October. “I’m not going to legitimize her candidacy.”

Stanton-King blasted Williams for being “afraid to face me.”

Ultimately, voters resonated more with Williams’ message and helped her rout Stanton-King on Election Day.

“WE DID IT! Thank you for your support — I would have never been able to do it without you,” the Georgia state senator tweeted Wednesday.

“This seat does not belong to me, it belongs to the people. And I’m ready to fight #OutLoudAndOnPurpose for the people of #GA5! Now let’s get in some #GoodTrouble y’all!”

Stanton-King acknowledged her loss but cast blame on the media and possible cheating for her defeat.

“I’m grateful for the love & support shown to me on this campaign Woman running I was in an uphill battle from the start. But even w/ bias media, an opponent refusing to debate, & a water main break in the only room that holds the ballots, the world still knows my name! The fight continues,” she tweeted.

Senator Nikema Williams

@NikemaWilliams

US House candidate, GA-5

1/2 I am the little girl who grew up in rural Alabama in a home with no indoor plumbing and no running water. I am a mom, a wife, a State Senator, and your next Congresswoman.

9:32 AM · Oct 9, 2020

510

137 people are Tweeting about this

Senator Nikema Williams

@NikemaWilliams

US House candidate, GA-5

WE DID IT! Thank you for your support -- I would have never been able to do it without you. This seat does not belong to me, it belongs to the people. And I'm ready to fight #OutLoudAndOnPurpose for the people of #GA5! Now let's get in some #GoodTrouble y'all!

11:28 PM · Nov 3, 2020

1.5K

268 people are Tweeting about this

Angela Stanton King 

@theangiestanton

US House candidate, GA-5

I know the world hears him

ANGELA STANTON KING I love the support this man and his administration has given me over the last year! This is truly what makes America Great! @realdonaldtrump is My forever President

#stantonkingforcongress

10:49 AM · Nov 2, 2020

729

The post Trump ally Angela Stanton-King loses Georgia House race with less than 15% of the vote appeared first on TheGrio.

REACTIONARY EXTREMIST

Bannon's lawyer drops him after comments suggesting Fauci should be beheaded

Brendan Morrow,
The Week•November 6, 2020


President Trump's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who was arrested over the summer for alleged fraud, has lost his lawyer after suggesting that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.

Lawyer William Burck on Friday "abruptly moved to drop" Bannon as a client after the former Trump strategist suggested violence against Fauci and Wray, The New York Times reports. Burck reportedly did not provide an explanation as to why he was doing so. A judge will have to approve change, the Times notes.

"Mr. Bannon is in the process of retaining new counsel," a letter to the court reportedly said.

The move came after Bannon said during his online show that Trump should fire Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Wray, director of the FBI, at the start of a second term should he win re-election, and then suggested he would like both to be killed.

"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England," Bannon said. "I'd put the heads on pikes. Right? I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

Twitter has also permanently suspended Bannon's show's account over the remarks, while YouTube removed a video of the comments for violating its policy against "inciting violence," CNN reports.

Bannon was arrested and hit with charges in August for allegedly defrauding donors to an online "Build the Wall" fundraising campaign. He has pleaded not guilty.

Fauci has spoken out about receiving death threats against him and his family during the COVID-19 pandemic, telling 60 Minutes in October that the "very fact that a public health message to save lives triggers such venom and animosity to me that it results in real and credible threats to my life and my safety" is "sad."

Wisconsin Republicans caught apparently encouraging voter fraud in Pennsylvania

Jeva Lange,
The Week•November 6, 2020


President Trump raged on Wednesday that he wants "all voting to stop." But emails obtained by The Daily Beast and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed Friday that it was Republican Party officials in Wisconsin who have allegedly been urging their volunteers to call Pennsylvanians and implore them to send in late — and therefore illegal — votes. "That would be exactly what the president and his campaign are accusing Democrats of doing," one legal expert observed to The Daily Beast.

The email was sent by a group called Kenosha For Trump around 5 p.m. on Thursday. "Trump Victory urgently needs volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots," the email read. The scheme seemed aimed to take advantage of a ruling in the state that said absentee ballots received by 5 p.m. on Friday must be counted — so long as they were properly postmarked by Election Day.

"[B]allots received by that point without postmarks, or with illegible postmarks, will be considered to have been mailed in time 'unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day,'" the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, adding that "in Pennsylvania, postage is prepaid on some ballot envelopes. These prepaid envelopes are not automatically postmarked." The idea appeared to be to slip votes through by the Friday deadline in order to swing margins in the state back in Trump's favor, although Ben Geffen, an attorney at the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, mused to The Daily Beast, "I wonder if they’re doing this in hopes of slipping one through and then waving it around as an example of the flawed process."

Either way, experts agreed the plan was exceedingly dumb. "This seems deeply stupid as it seems to be a solicitation to commit voter fraud," Richard Hasen, an elections law specialist, told the Journal Sentinel. "It's hard to believe this is real."

Report on disgraced ex U.S. cardinal McCarrick out Nov. 10: Vatican

U.S. Cardinal McCarrick arrives for a meeting at the Synod Hall in the Vatican

By Philip Pullella Reuters•November 6, 2020

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican said on Friday that its long-awaited report into disgraced ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick will be released on Tuesday.

Vatican sources told Reuters on Thursday that the report was imminent and would be released before the start of the annual meeting of American bishops Nov. 16-17

Pope Francis expelled McCarrick from the Roman Catholic priesthood last year after a Vatican investigation found him guilty of sexual crimes against minors and adults and abuse of power.


The report, which is several hundred pages long, is expected to show how McCarrick managed to rise through the ranks even though his history of sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians was an open secret.

In 2018, the pope ordered a thorough study of all documents in Holy See offices concerning McCarrick. The four U.S. dioceses where he served - New York, Metuchen, Newark, and Washington, D.C. - carried out separate investigations to feed into the Vatican report.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said on his website that the report "could be another black-eye for the Church ... but better that the story come out, in all its awful detail."

Dolan, whose archdiocesan review board in 2018 was the first to find that allegations against McCarrick were "credible and substantiated," said he hoped the report will "bring some measure of peace to the victim-survivors, as well as serve as a lesson on how to prevent a similar recurrence in the future".

Horrified by deadly attacks, French Muslims protect church

ANGELA CHARLTON,
Associated Press•November 6, 2020

This photo take on Oct. 29, 2020 shows a group of Muslim volunteers protecting the Saint-Fulcran cathedral In Lodeve, southern France. A group of French Muslims stood guard outside the Saint-Fulcran Cathedral in Lodeve for the All Saints' holiday, to protect it from eventual violence and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers. Many welcomed the initiative, organized by local residents as a gesture of peace after a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in the French city of Nice. (Alain Mendez via AP)


PARIS (AP) — As a French-born Muslim, Elyazid Benferhat’s stomach turned when he heard about a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in Nice. Then he decided to act.

A self-described man of peace and pragmatism, Benferhat and a friend gathered a group of young Muslim men to stand guard outside their town's cathedral for the All Saints’ holiday weekend, to symbolically protect it and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers.

Parishioners at the 13th-century church in the southern town of Lodeve were deeply touched. The parish priest said their gesture gave him hope in a time of turmoil.

Benferhat, speaking with a distinctive southern French accent, identified himself as “more French than anything.” While his mother was born in Algeria, he was born in France and grew up speaking only French. “But I am also Muslim ... and we have seen Islamophobia in this country, and terrorism,” he told The Associated Press.

“In recent years, I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” because every time Islamic extremist violence strikes France, he said, French Muslims face new stigmatization, even though “we had nothing to do with it.”

He called the beheading of a teacher near Paris last month — targeted because he showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for a debate on free expression — an act of “unbelievable, unprecedented cruelty.”

Then when three people were killed last Thursday in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice, Benferhat said he was so sickened that he wanted to do something “so that everyone wakes up.”

Benferhat, who works for French oil company Total and coaches at a local football club, talked to a Muslim friend who was in Nice that day, “and we had this idea. We needed to do something beyond paying homage to the victims. We said, we will protect churches ourselves.”

They recruited volunteers among their friends and at his football club, and guarded the church that night and again for Sunday Mass. He said they also coordinated with local police, after France’s government promised to increase security at sensitive religious sites.

“It’s very good, these young people who are against violence,” the cathedral’s priest, the Rev. Luis Iniguez, told the AP.

When a local newspaper published a photo of parishioners posing with their Muslim guards, Iniguez hung it inside the Gothic cathedral, which serves as an anchor for town life. “People were happy to see that,” he said, especially amid recent concerns about tensions between France and the Muslim world, on top of ongoing fears of the virus.

The small-town gesture drew national attention, and with it, online invective from some far-right voices.

But Benferhat said the response has been “90% positive.”

His group is considering how to take the idea forward, and would like to do it again for Christmas, and for other towns to follow Lodeve’s lead. But for now all religious services in France are banned at least until Dec. 1 to try to slow fast-rising virus infections.

Whatever he does next, he says, “it will come from the heart.”

Attacks in France Point to a Threat Beyond Extremist Networks

Norimitsu Onishi, Constant Méheut and Layli Foroudi,
The New York Times•November 6, 2020

A makeshift memorial at the the Notre-Dame basilica the day after a Tunisian migrant killed three people there with a knife before lunging at police officers while yelling, "Allahu akbar," in Nice, France, Oct. 30, 2020. (Mauricio Lima/The New York Times)Less

PARIS — All were unknown to police intelligence officials. None pledged allegiance to a terrorist group, and no group claimed them as members. None stated any political agenda. Signs of radicalization, if at all visible, were expressed on social media. And they came armed with little more than knives.

The three young men behind recent terrorist attacks that have shaken France present a difficult challenge to French authorities — isolated, self-radicalized individuals rather than Islamist extremist networks — raising tough questions about whether the broad measures the government has taken in response are the right ones.

Unattached to any group, harder to track and with an often obscured, hair-trigger propensity for violence that needs just the right spark, they are a far cry from the well-orchestrated and synchronized assaults in the wave of terrorism that swept France a half-decade ago. Involving sophisticated planning and weapons, the past attacks killed and injured hundreds and were claimed by the Islamic State group and an al-Qaida affiliate.

They were also different from this week’s attack in Vienna, which was carried out in the name of the Islamic State by an Austrian national already convicted of trying to join the organization in Syria.

“It’s a personal jihad, religious and without demands,” said Bernard Squarcini, a former head of the French domestic intelligence services, adding that France was confronted with “a new generation” of Islamist extremists.

In the past year, all seven Islamist extremist attacks in France, including the most recent three, have been carried out by individuals unknown to the intelligence services, who used unsophisticated weapons and had no clear links to terrorist groups, said Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research organization.

The latest, Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, arrived late last month in the southern city of Nice just weeks after leaving Tunisia with other migrants on a boat from his hometown, the port city of Sfax. Armed only with a knife, he killed three people at the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice before lunging at police officers while yelling, “Allahu akbar.” Hospitalized with serious wounds and also suffering from COVID-19, he has yet to be interrogated.

In his hometown, family and friends said that Aouissaoui migrated to Europe looking for better opportunities. After dropping out of school, he did odd jobs, went to clubs, drank and smoked hashish. In the past year, he grew more serious and started to pray, though family and friends said he showed no signs of radicalization.

“He spoke like everyone else in the neighborhood. He is not someone politicized. He didn’t talk about political parties or anything,” said Karim Hamzi, a friend of Aouissaoui. “He would just say, ‘This country is going into a wall. The best thing to do in this country is to leave.’”

Following the collapse of the Islamic State in Syria, this new generation of extremists has emerged in a “jihadist atmosphere” prevalent on some social media sites and around some European cities, said Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist who is an expert on Islam and the Arab world.

In an environment that emphasizes “cultural ruptures” — pitting a radical, Salafist Islam against the West but also against moderate brands of Islam — these young men become radicalized, he said, and will act with the right spark.

“Without this atmosphere, there wouldn’t be a spark,” Kepel said. “Without a spark, there wouldn’t be an attack, either.”

In the recent attacks, the spark was the republication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which led to huge protests overseas, including in Pakistan. Kepel said that videos showing protesters “brandishing enormous knives” appeared to have influenced the man behind the first attack.

According to French authorities, Zaher Hassan Mahmood, a 25-year-old man who arrived in France from Pakistan several years ago to look for work, repeatedly watched such videos before buying a butcher knife and stabbing two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Sept. 25.

News of the stabbing appeared to push into action an 18-year-old refugee of Chechen descent, Abdoullakh Anzorov, who grew up in France and in recent months had become active on extremist social media sites. On the same day of the stabbing, Anzorov began looking for the addresses of individuals who had offended Islam, according to an analysis of his deleted Twitter account by Le Monde.

Eventually, he settled on a middle school teacher whose showing of Charlie Hebdo caricatures in a class on freedom of expression had angered many Muslim parents and students. Armed with a knife and two pellet guns, he beheaded the teacher, Samuel Paty, on Oct. 16.

“In these last three attacks, there’s an absence of political demand but just a religious demand,” Wassim Nasr, a journalist specializing on the jihadi movement and an author of a book on the Islamic State, said, adding that the assailants were “fanatics” rather than “jihadists.”

The religious anger, stemming from the republication of the caricatures, has enlarged the pool of potential terrorists, Nasr said, adding that it played into the jihadi movement’s narrative that all Muslims are concerned by their fight.

But instead of acknowledging the exclusively religious fanaticism behind the attacks, the French government has given them a political dimension, he said.

“That becomes counterproductive,” he said.

The French government has said that the main threat comes from “Islamist separatism,” what it describes as a homegrown radical Islamist network that has mounted a challenge to France’s strict secularism. In response to the recent attacks, French authorities have cracked down on Muslim individuals and organizations they have described as Islamist.

Olivier Roy, a political scientist at the European University Institute in Florence and a specialist in Islam, said that the French government’s response was inappropriate given the new nature of the threat.

“The government’s mistake is to think that this type of radicalization, which seems almost mystical to me, is the result of a religious indoctrination,” he said.

But Brisard of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism said, “They act alone, but they’re not disconnected.”

To fight this new wave of terrorists, France must eradicate extremist networks, which are “natural and logical intermediaries in the process that leads to violence,” and widen France’s intelligence-gathering capacity by involving the local police and officials, he added.

Squarcini, the former head of domestic intelligence, said that tracking individuals with no links to terrorist groups posed a new challenge to the country’s intelligence services, adding that they must now try to understand signals mostly on social media.

“We need to sort it out intelligently and perform a finer analysis,” he added. “We’re less good at doing that.”

It was not clear how Aouissaoui, the Tunisian behind the attack in Nice, arrived in France.

After leaving Sfax on Sept. 19 on a boat with other migrants, he spent several weeks on a ship used by Italian authorities to quarantine arrivals to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, family and friends said.

Ahmed Tahri, 25 and from Sfax, shared a room with Aouissaoui on the ship but was sent back to Tunisia. He said that Aouissaoui mostly kept to himself aboard the ship.

“He would wake up in the morning, pray, eat,” Tahri recalled, adding that Aouissaoui often borrowed his phone to call home, occasionally read the Quran and exercised in their room.

A close friend in Sfax, Ahmed Kiid, said that in calls from the ship Aouissaoui did not speak about politics — only about his plans to go to France, where he said he could find work and other people from Sfax.

“He wanted a car, a smartphone like other people his age,” said his mother, Gamra, who told him not to go.

She and other family members spoke on the veranda of their home in a neighborhood where broken bricks and tiles littered a dusty road. They said that Aouissaoui used to sleep in the living room with several of his nine siblings.

Aouissaoui left Tunisia without informing his family, only calling from Italy. After getting off the quarantine ship, he worked on an olive farm and bought new clothes and the smartphone he wanted so badly, his family and friends said.

On his Facebook account, he posted a photo of himself posing with his new phone. A line above the photo read, “Allah knows that we are not here for this mortal world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company