Okay, important HOUSING CIVIL RIGHTS ALERT: Trump is currently trying to shoot a bunch of holes in the Fair Housing Act. They're trying to insert a huge carveout, especially for financial institutions, in the part of the Act that bars racial segregation and discrimination.
There's actually something you can do it about sitting that'll only take a minute and doesn't require you to leave your computer - yes, you, random Twitter person - but I'm going to do a little thread about why it's important so folks have context.
So, right now, the Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to create racial disparities in access to housing - including by creating housing segregation. It doesn't matter if you're a public or private entity, and it doesn't matter if the discrimination was unintentional!
It took fair housing advocates 47 years after the passage of the Act - i.e., until 2015 - to get the Supreme Court to admit the existence of this part of the law. It was a huge win for civil rights...
and now, after only 4 years, Trump's HUD is trying to dispose of it.
(Here is where I note that Trump's first act in public life was facing a fair housing complaint for barring black people from his buildings.)
HUD is undercutting the Fair Housing Act by redrafting the rule that lays out disparate impact liability, to add a bunch of conditions and exemptions. They claim to be following the 2015 Supreme Court case, but they've added a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the case.
There are many problems with the new rule, but the worst part is probably a giant carveout for algorithms, which would essentially exempt all financial institutions from having to worry about discrimination or segregation AT ALL. It's bonkers.
Even if Dems win in 2020, to reverse this they'd have to go through the whole rulemaking process again. That can be blocked and takes years (which is why Trump has only gotten around to doing it in late 2019). So it's MUCH better to stop the new rule now than to fix it later.
Here's the thing: HUD has to read and address comments it receives on the rule. Civil rights organizations have set up an online portal to submit those comments. You can go here and tell HUD to abandon the rule right now. It'll take less than a minute. defendcivilrights.org/make-a-comment
There's a form letter if you're not sure what to say, and that's totally fine, but if you've got more thoughts, that's even better. You don't have to be an expert, at all.
If you want to see some specific problems and language to complain about, here's a thread talking about the awful algorithmic exclusion. Again, they have to address your comments, regardless of whether you're an expert:
If you're even slightly concerned about housing discrimination or segregation I also recommend following @NAACP_LDF and @PRRAC_DC, diehard civil rights orgs that have been fighting racism for decades and haven't given an inch to the Trump administration.
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Not to state the obvious but the GOP’s obsession with mass deportation doesn’t come from any interest in improving policy outcomes but because it’s a rationale for large-scale state terror against a population the GOP dislikes. It’s a pretext to hurt people for fun
Anti-trans laws? Impossibly vast deportation programs? Attacks on college campuses and protesters? What it all has in common is that it’s a pretext to target a perceived set of enemies and derive pleasure from their pain
That’s why the programmatic details and aims are always so sketchy, why no compromise can be arrived at. They don’t really exist except to give the most meager facial justification.
The religious zeal that surrounds the anti-Biden obsessives is really frightening. Not even the slightest hint of doubt about the remarkably reckless course of action they're demanding.
Being a few points behind in the polls after two weeks of saturation-level media panic isn't great, but Trump was much further behind in 2016 and still won. There have been last-minute candidate switches before and they ended in disaster.
The fact of the matter remains that Biden had a really bad, weird debate, and then has continued to campaign and serve normally. But the foaming panic has infected every corner of the media and now the Democratic Party and is causing dramatically more damage than the debate did.
-the media right now is publishing many stories about how Biden should drop out
-those stories are pushing his polls down among swing voters, endangering his campaign
-why shouldn’t/couldn’t they publish the same stories about Trump
The main difference here is not that Biden and Trump have different swing voters - that doesn’t make sense.
The difference is that when Biden does something bad, media says “he should drop out” over and over, but when Trump does, media says “his voters won’t care” and moves on.
The response of the media/political class becomes self-fulfilling. There is no mounting pressure against Trump after horrifying statements and crimes, because everyone agrees it won’t matter. But Biden botches a debate and the narrative mounts for weeks. This is the difference!
This is an open threat from a far-right account with 2.5 million followers. This is where we are: these fascist goons are so emboldened by our rogue Supreme Court and Donald Trump that they're openly threatening to kill liberal politicians.
This guy appears on stage with top Trump luminaries. He is indistinguishable from the worst kind of homicidal Trump troll. These people have just given themselves the power to prosecute, jail, and assassinate their enemies - the point of my tweet - and now are planning to do it.
They are not being remotely ambivalent about what this "You have less than 5 months" refrain means. They are saying they are going to kill us after Trump is elected. They are counting down. They are explicit about it. They are excited by it.
We’ve spent eight years waiting for the political elite in this country to wake up to the fact that Trump is a true authoritarian threat who must be confronted directly before he destroys the foundations of constitutional government and here we are, still waiting
He’s a liar, a thug, a demagogue, and he wants to be a tyrant. You have to fight people like that DIRECTLY: you say what they are, you put them in jail, you keep them out of politics, you resist them with whatever it takes. You don’t rely on them losing a policy debate
The bizarre bankshot approach favored by the American political class has always failed: “Instead of saying what Trump is - instead of saying he’s anathema to American republican government - we’ll tiptoe around it, and say his economic policies are bad”
every single day false memes suggesting biden is senile get pushed out by the RNC, are instantly shared across half a dozen national news outlets, are repeated by through hundreds of sinclair outlets, and get hundreds of millions of social views
dems: "why is biden unpopular??"
the other side has built an enormous, nation-spanning propaganda network, where everywhere you turn you see people presenting far-right ideology and anti-Democratic propaganda as truth. Dems have ALMOST COMPLETELY IGNORED this, because they figure their policy is more popular
right-wing ideas are not just everywhere. they are presented in a context that makes them seem like the consensus truth. people aren't seeing "biden is senile" in ads, which they know not to trust - they're seeing it in news headlines, in memes their friends are sharing.