This 15 July 2019 British Channel 4 TV video says about itself: Trump says his racist tweets are “not at all” racist Four outspoken Democratic politicians – all women of colour, all US citizens, all but one born in the United States, yet, according to President Trump, they should all go home and fix the […]
The field is set. The mics are on — and soon the gloves are off. The first Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 election is underway, and NBC News will bring you real-time news, analysis and fact-checks of (almost) everything the 10 candidates on stage Wednesday night have to say.
Follow live as we kick off Night One of the two-night debate, hosted by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo.
Live Blog
Jason Abbruzzese
Inslee talks about his immigration record
While everyone debated what they would do on immigration, Inslee talked about his record on the issue.
“I’m proud that we passed law that prevents local law enforcement from being turned into many ICE agents,” he said. “I’m proud to be the first governor to stand up to Donald Tump’s heinous Muslim ban. I’m proud to be a person who not only talks about Dreamers, but one of the first to help them get a college education so they can realize their dreams.”
Allan Smith
Castro standing out?
I think it’s fair to say that, so far, among the lower-polling candidates, Castro is the only one who seems to be having a moment. Tough exchange with O’Rourke, answers that seem to be garnering positive attention online. Not getting cut off by other candidates or the moderators.
Julián Castro entered the night with a relatively low profile and slim polling averages. But the former Obama-era HUD secretary’s sharp, forceful comments about immigration could significantly raise his national profile.
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Jason Abbruzzese
2h ago / 2:58 AM GMT+1
Iran questions provide a breather
After fiery and passionate answers on health care and immigration, responses to questions on Iran provide a bit of a breather. There’s broad agreement to get back into Obama’s Iran deal or negotiate a new one, but not much debate otherwise.
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Jane C. Timm
2h ago / 3:02 AM GMT+1
Fact check: Would the 2013 immigration bill have lowered the debt?
The last Senate immigration bill “brings the debt down by 158 billion,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said on Wednesday night, referring to the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013.
To be sure: this number is about the change in deficit, not the overall debt. The debt would have simply risen at a lower pace should the bill have become law.
Ajury has been unable to decide whether Jack Renshaw, a neo-Nazi who admitted a terrorist plot to kill an MP, remained a member of a banned terrorist group. At the end of his fourth and final trial of the past two years, the full story of those cases can now be told – Daniel De Simone/BBC News
They drank there regularly. Normally on a Saturday. Often during the week, too.
Numbers varied – from only a couple of drinkers to as many as 10.
This is the Friar Penketh in Warrington, a busy Wetherspoons in the town centre.
Image captionFriar Penketh, Warrington
But the conversation of the drinking party was not that of ordinary lads out socialising – football or work – but focused on far darker subjects, such as their hatred of Jewish and non-white people, their veneration of Nazism and Adolf Hitler, and their fascination with terrorism.
On Saturday 1 July 2017, several members and former members of the banned neo-Nazi organisation National Action arrived in the late afternoon.
They were joined in the early evening by a youthful-looking man whose wide, hostile eyes are in contrast to his slender, timid frame.
Almost immediately, the then 22-year-old began complaining about an ongoing police investigation into him for stirring up racial hatred in speeches.
There was sympathy for Jack Renshaw among his fellow drinkers.
Image captionJack Renshaw – (still from a British National Party video)
As the evening wore on, he revealed an imminent plan – that if he was charged by police, he would make a political statement by killing his local MP Rosie Cooper.
He had already bought a gladius machete – a Roman short sword – to carry out the murder.
Hostages would be taken, he elaborated, and he would lure a female detective who was investigating him to the scene by demanding to speak to her. He would then kill her as well.
After that, he would commit “suicide by cop” by advancing on armed police wearing a fake suicide vest, he told the group.
The attack would be an act of “white jihad” – a slogan used by National Action – and he planned to make a martyrdom-style video setting this out.
None of those around the table challenged Renshaw, and two of them even suggested alternative targets, namely the then home secretary and a synagogue.
What none of them knew was that one of their number was secretly passing information to the anti-racism charity Hope not Hate.
Robbie Mullen, once a committed neo-Nazi, had grown disillusioned and wanted out.
“I didn’t want to be involved in killing anyone, or a group I was involved with killing people. I just didn’t want anyone to get killed or hurt,” he says.
As Mullen left the pub that night, Renshaw gave him a hug and said they would probably not see one another again.
Alarmed by what was unfolding, Mullen immediately contacted Hope not Hate
“Jack is going to kill an MP soon,” he told them.
Jack Renshaw
Jack Renshaw’s case starkly illustrates the dangers of radicalisation.
He was born in Lancashire and became involved in politics in his teens – first with the English Defence League and then the British National Party (BNP), after meeting its then leader Nick Griffin at an event.
When he finished school, he started a degree in economics and politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, but was asked to leave because of his far-right activism.
Image captionJack Renshaw – (still from a BNP video)
Renshaw spent years in the BNP, appearing on its posters, in videos, and as a speaker at conferences. He stood for Blackpool Council and worked at the European Parliament in Brussels.
He also involved himself in campaigning against the sexual grooming of children.
Image captionJack Renshaw – (pictured on a BNP poster)
Once asked to describe his journey, Renshaw said: “I started off basically as a bit of a civic nationalist with, let’s say, slightly covert racist thoughts, and now I’m an outright racist national socialist.”
National Action would become his political home.
The youthful British group, which was founded in 2013, was openly racist and neo-Nazi.
It would be banned in December 2016 after an official assessment concluded it was unlawfully glorifying terrorism.
National Action had even used an official Twitter account to celebrate the murder of Jo Cox MP by a white supremacist.
Robbie Mullen, then a warehouse worker living in Runcorn, Cheshire, had joined the group after becoming absorbed by extremist politics.
He had researched other organisations, but was drawn in by the brash, confident National Action, whose members dressed in all-black at demonstrations and used social media to promote their activities.
Image captionRobbie Mullen
Mullen, now 25, told the BBC he was first attracted by the “way they looked” and because “they were all around my age, whereas the usual far right were old men drinking in a pub.”
Mullen, like Renshaw who was a National Action spokesperson, became a prominent figure in the group, helping to organise activities in north west England.
Renshaw seemed to revel in the cruelty of his chosen ideology.
His social media pages became a vile stream of hatred and malicious conspiracy theories, with Jewish people a frequent target of abuse.
But it was two anti-Semitic speeches he made on behalf of National Action that would prove his undoing.
During a demonstration on Blackpool seafront in March 2016, Renshaw said Jewish people were “parasites” and that Britain had taken the wrong side in World War Two, instead of fighting with the Nazis who were implementing the “final solution”.
At a speech in Yorkshire a month earlier, he had said Adolf Hitler was “right in many senses”, but wrong when he “showed mercy to people who did not deserve mercy”.
Renshaw said that Jewish people should be “eradicated”.
Image captionJack Renshaw at a National Action rally – (NA propaganda material)
He was arrested at his mother’s house in Blackpool in January 2017 and held on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.
His mobile phones and other items were seized.
However, his speeches were not the only matters under investigation.
Renshaw the paedophile
Renshaw, who was openly homophobic, was secretly a paedophile who had been grooming boys for sex.
For nearly a year he had been using a fake Facebook profile to sexually groom two boys, who were aged between 13 and 15 at the time.
Despite not meeting the children, he offered them money for sex and requested intimate photographs. Police were alerted after a relative saw messages on one of the boy’s phones.
Detectives established the Facebook messages had been sent from the Blackpool address occupied by Jack Renshaw.
When first arrested in January, he had only been interviewed in relation to the speeches, before being released on bail while inquiries continued.
One of the investigating officers – Det Con Victoria Henderson – was tasked with keeping in touch with the suspect and she also became involved in the sexual offences inquiry.
In May that year, Renshaw was re-arrested and questioned about the grooming.
He must have realised his deception was at an end.
DC Henderson later said Renshaw had been “shocked and upset” and “gone visibly white and was very teary”.
He denied grooming the boys, despite evidence of the offending having been found on his own phones.
He told DC Henderson he was still a virgin, did not believe in sex outside marriage, and that his taste in pornography was “quite traditional” and “quite conservative”.
While admitting to having searched online for gay pornography “out of interest”, he denied being homosexual and said same-sex relationships were “unnatural”.
Within two days of being released on bail, Renshaw searched for DC Henderson on Facebook.
She had become a target.
Unknown to police, Renshaw had already begun planning an attack on his local MP Rosie Cooper, which would be a political killing. He now resolved to also murder DC Henderson, which would be an act of personal revenge.
Earlier that month he had researched the West Lancashire MP and Googled: “How long to die after jugular cut”.
Image captionRosie Cooper – MP for West Lancashire
On 7 June, he ordered a machete online – described by its manufacturer as offering “19 inches of unprecedented piercing and slashing power” – and paid for next-day delivery.
After receiving it, he shared an image of the weapon with associates using the encrypted Telegram messaging app.
But Renshaw’s plans were foiled because of Robbie Mullen.
Robbie Mullen
By this time, Mullen was secretly communicating with Hope not Hate.
After establishing contact in spring 2017, Mullen said that National Action members had not disbanded, despite the group having been banned. He said they were continuing to meet, train together in a private gym, and communicate via encrypted messaging applications.
Media captionJack Renshaw admitted plotting to kill an MP but denied membership of National Action
The public trappings of the group – demonstrations, the website, the name – had gone, but he claimed the core of the group remained.
When it was banned, Mullen later told the BBC, National Action’s longstanding fascination with terrorism became central to its purpose, and the group began planning for imminent racial warfare.
After Renshaw laid out his violent plans in the pub on 1 July 2017, Mullen spoke to Matthew Collins, his contact and Hope not Hate’s research director.
Collins, who was on holiday at the time, recalls the moment he was told that Renshaw “was going to kill an MP imminently, immediately”.
Image captionBoxing training – (National Action propaganda video)
He remembers asking Mullen: “‘How immediately?’ and he said, ‘It’s going to happen soon’. And this horrific, unimaginable story unfolded.”
The next day Hope not Hate got a message to Rosie Cooper warning her of the danger.
She informed the police and suddenly found herself at the centre of a counter terrorism investigation – only a year after the murder of her colleague Jo Cox.
While this was happening, Renshaw was being interviewed in Lancashire – again by DC Henderson – about the grooming offences. He was then separately charged with stirring up racial hatred in the two speeches.
He was released on bail, and that night posted a series of messages on Facebook indicative of his mindset.
“I’m spending my time with family… It will all be over soon.”
In another, he wrote: “I’ll laugh last but it may not be for the longest.”
Counter terrorism detectives hurriedly tried to locate Renshaw, but he was not at his bail address.
While searching his uncle’s house, they discovered the machete that Renshaw had bought hidden in an airing cupboard.
Image captionPolice photos of Renshaw’s machete found in an airing cupboard
He was eventually found and arrested on suspicion of making threats to kill.
The next day, he appeared before a court for the stirring up racial hatred offences and the prosecution successfully opposed bail.
Renshaw was off the streets.
Robbie Mullen, on the other hand, continued associating with the same people.
None of them knew he was the source of intelligence about the proposed attack.
There were concerns that Mullen, himself, could face prosecution for membership of National Action.
Image captionRobbie Mullen today
Immunity had to be granted, and the police had to assess whether his evidence could be used in a prosecution.
In autumn 2017, six people who had been drinking in the Friar Penketh on the night Renshaw revealed his plot were arrested and eventually charged.
Two of them, including the group leader Christopher Lythgoe, were convicted of membership of National Action. One man was acquitted of the same charge. Two juries were unable to decide whether the other men – Renshaw included – had stayed in the group after it was banned.
Mullen, having refused witness protection, was issued with a “threat to life” notice by the authorities.
Hope not Hate rushed him away late at night and took him to a safe place – he has been unable to return to his home or job since then.
On trial
Renshaw eventually faced four trials over the past 14 months.
In January 2018, at Preston Crown Court, he was convicted of two counts of stirring up racial hatred in speeches and later sentenced to three years in prison
In June, at the same court, he was convicted of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and jailed for an additional 18 months.
The case can only be reported now his final trial has concluded.
In the dock in Preston he appeared sheepish as videos of police interviews with his two young victims, conducted by DC Henderson, were shown to the court.
One boy described how Renshaw – using a fake Facebook profile under an assumed name – called him a “hottie” and “jailbait”.
“He was getting too weird, saying he wanted to do weird sexual things to me,” the victim said.
“Deffo getting cuddled you,” Renshaw had informed him.
Image captionJack Renshaw – (photo from Renshaw’s social media)
Renshaw asked the child for explicit photos and tried to entice him into sex by offering money, drugs and pizza: “One night. 10 grand. Me and you.”
“I was scared for my life,” the child told DC Henderson.
The second boy said Renshaw bombarded him with messages daily.
Around Christmas time, he sent the child an image of some presents and said he could have them in exchange for intimate pictures.
Renshaw even sent the boy graphic photos of himself.
When the child called Renshaw a “dirty paedophile” he replied by saying “that turned him on”, the victim recalled.
Renshaw, in the witness box, said his only explanation for how evidence of his sexual interest in children – including very explicit search terms – came to be on four separate mobile phones to which only he had access, that were seized by police over a period of several months, was “real time synchronised access” by Hope not Hate.
Hacking, to put it another way.
Hacking so complex it was beyond the capabilities of advanced states.
The fake Facebook profile had been accessed during bursts of online activity that Renshaw admitted were his own, including sometimes within seconds of social media accounts in his own name being used.
No expert evidence was advanced to support the defence thesis and the prosecution technical experts – who agreed it was impossible for any hacking to have taken place – were not asked by Renshaw’s barrister about the theory, because the defendant only put it forward so late in the legal process.
The prosecution described his story as a “complete fantasy.”
When asked if he had any qualifications in expert phone analysis, Renshaw admitted he did not but insisted: “I used to be a technician for Dixons retail.”
During his third trial – at the Old Bailey in summer 2018 – Renshaw was more forthcoming, appearing unashamed at his murderous plans and hatred of others.
On the first morning of the trial, Renshaw suddenly pleaded guilty to preparing to murder Rosie Cooper and making a threat to kill DC Henderson.
But he denied membership of National Action and so remained a defendant.
When called to give evidence, he said Rosie Cooper was chosen as his target because “she happened to be my local MP” and was the “most logistical representative of the state”.
“It was me wanting to send the state a message. If you beat a dog long enough it bites,” he told the court.
He said the plan was to “turn up at one of her social events” and then “hack” at her jugular with the machete.
Renshaw, a Holocaust denier who told the court he wanted all Jewish people to be killed, stated his neo-Nazi beliefs loftily but defensively, claiming to be impervious to the horrors such ideas have generated while at the same time calling for more.
His haughtiness was at odds with his true position: a convicted paedophile and terrorist facing many years in prison.
Jurors were unable to decide whether he had remained a member of National Action, nor could the jurors in a retrial.
Mullen, who appeared as a witness in both London cases, must now start a new life, but he is unsure of its shape.
“I don’t know at the minute,” he says. “I live month-to-month – I don’t think into the future too much.”
But he knows things will never be the same.
Mullen nods quietly when asked if he understands that he probably saved lives, including that of an MP.
He is still unsure precisely what first triggered his decision to start secretly passing information to Hope not Hate, for which he now works.
“I’ve been asked this twice in court. I don’t really know,” he says.
But he says the violent plans and intentions he was told about meant he had to act.
“I knew that if I could do something to stop it then I had to.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern receives a hug from a student during her visit to Cashmere high school which lost two students during Friday’s mass shooting in Christchurch. Photograph: Kai Schwörer/Getty Images
Walking hand in hand with those affected, Ardern’s focus was on grieving and commiserating with the affected community. The alleged killer Brenton Tarrant was not representative of New Zealanders’ values and beliefs, she said. Quite simply he was: “Not us”.
Everyone in New Zealand and internationally is reading the same stories I read. And my response is no different. Yes, I have a role I need to play. I feel the grief, I hear the grief. But I also have a duty of care to the people involved in this to also keep going. And so if the imam who stood at the front of a mosque and saw firsthand the loss of his worshippers in front of him can keep going, then I definitely can.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern
“The everyday discourse in New Zealand since the attacks hasn’t been one of hate and anger, it’s been we can do this, we can heal, we can come through this,” says Professor Jennifer Curtin, director of the Public Policy Institute at Auckland University.
Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern is a New Zealand politician serving as the 40th and current Prime Minister of New Zealand
“She has shown a quiet, strong leadership, and been very focused on looking after the people who are most affected straight away. The killer has barely been mentioned.”
Right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson claimed Muslims in America are “treated better” than white people as he expressed concern that repressed white Americans may be incited to carry out an attack in the U.S. similar to the recent massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left at least 50 dead.
Peterson said during his Friday radio show that “white people are getting angry rather than speaking up prior to anger” because “normal whites” and Christians are treated more poorly in the U.S. than Muslims are.
The controversial pro–Donald Trump host rejected the labeling of suspected Christchurch mosque shooter as a “white supremacist,” claiming he doesn’t understand the news media’s definition. Peterson warned listeners not to support politicians, including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, because “if white people get angry, this is what’s going to happen” in the United States.
Peterson, who is black, claimed on his national show he doesn’t “really know what it means” for someone to be a white supremacist in New Zealand and derided the term.
“But I know here in this country, the antifa people are protected,” he said, referring to anti-fascist militant groups. “And they are more violent and terrorist than normal whites. But the normal whites are called ‘white supremacy’ while the radical, antifa whites are being protected” by the Democratic Party and news media.
Peterson went on to justify his claim that Muslims in America are treated better than white people by pointing to the 2018 election of Minnesota Democrat Omar and Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, the nation’s first two Muslim congresswomen.
“In this country, the Muslims are treated better than the Christians and white people,” Peterson continued. “We just saw where they allow two Muslims to become congressmen [sic] in our government, and that is not good. Those two women hate Israel, and they hate America.”
Right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson recently claimed on his show he doesn’t “really know what it means” for someone to be a white supremacist in New Zealand.GETTY IMAGES PHILLIP FARAONE/STRINGER
Both Tlaib and Omar expressed their sadness and shock with the news last Friday of the New Zealand massacre. Tlaib issued a statement saying, “This morning I tried to hold back tears as I hugged my two brown, Muslim boys a little tighter and longer. I am so angry at those who follow the ‘white supremacy’ agenda in my own country that sends a signal across the world that massacres like this is some kind of call to action.”
Peterson gave some advice to angry white people who may be considering mimicking the New Zealand mosque shooting: “You’ve got to start standing up before you get your anger out of control in this country.”
On Sunday morning, Peterson tweeted a headline from the right-wing New American magazine to his nearly 55,000 followers: “Christchurch Shooter Praises Communist China, Condemns Conservatism and Capitalism: Media Call Him a Trump Supporter.” The right-wing minister is only one of dozens of high-profile conservatives defending Trump and his rhetoric against accusations he influenced the New Zealand shooter.
Last year, Peterson claimed there wasn’t one thing he could think of that black people went into and “made better.” And a white producer of his show proclaimed on the air that the n-word is not racist.
