Brian Culpepper and Mike Schoeler – Channel 4 screencap
Trump’s surprise rise to become the GOP presidential nominee, built largely on a willingness to openly criticize minority groups and tap into long-simmering racial divisions, has reenergized white supremacist groups and drawn them into mainstream American politics like nothing seen in decades.
White nationalist leaders who once shunned presidential races have endorsed Trump, marking the first time some have openly supported a candidate from one of the two main parties.
Members are showing up at his rallies, knocking on doors to get out the vote and organizing debate-watching parties.
White supremacists are active on social media and their websites report a sharp rise in traffic and visitors, particularly when posting stories and chat forums about the New York businessman.
Stormfront, already one of the oldest and largest white nationalist websites, reported a 600% increase in readership since President Obama’s election, and now has more than one in five threads devoted to Trump. It reportedly had to upgrade its servers recently due to the increased traffic.
“Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go,” said Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank based in Arlington, Va.
Not since Southern segregationist George Wallace’s failed presidential bids in 1968 and 1972 have white nationalists been so motivated to participate in a presidential election.
Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer website and an emerging leader of a new generation of millennial extremists, said he had “zero interest” in the 2012 general election and viewed presidential politics as “pointless.” That is, until he heard Trump.
“Trump had me at ‘build a wall,’” Anglin said. “Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign.”
One California white nationalist leader dug into his own pockets to give $12,000 to launch a pro-Trump super PAC that made robocalls in seven primary states — with more promised before the Nov. 8 election.
“The idea that [Trump] is taking a wrecking ball to ‘political correctness’ excites them,” said Peter Montgomery, who has tracked far right groups as a senior fellow at People for the American Way, the Norman Lear-founded advocacy group. “They’ve been marginalized in our discourse, but he’s really made space for them…. He has energized these folks politically in a way that’s going to have damaging long-term consequences.”
The LA Times has a good look at this ongoing problem.
This is what scares the crap out of me. I’ll wager that these people are under-represented in the polling… All too often, elections hang on turn-out -- if he can persuade enough people who don’t normally vote to show up and vote for him, that could push him over the top. But even if he loses, I worry that they aren’t going back to sitting on the sidelines.
Dunc, #1
Exactly what worries me as well. And the other thing is that these people haven’t had a presidential nominee who says openly what they want to hear in such a long time that they don’t care about all his corruption and failures.
This is slightly off-topic but I hate that damn term. He is taking a wrecking ball to decency and empathy and to being a good person and leader. Political correctness makes it sound like it’s some special category. It’s like “being nice” is reserved for white men, and when you be nice to women or POC, it’s “political correctness”.
I worry, too. Has anyone else noticed the date that follows this year’s Election Day?
Saad:
As Gyasi Ross said, “That’s not political correctness. That’s fixing inhumanity.”
I don’t think that’s off topic in the least, because every other person in love with Trump is citing his fantastic “non-pcness”, when it’s nothing of the kind.
Not wishing to Godwin the thread, but everybody who is not afraid that Trump presidency will lead to a lot of deaths does not pay attention. I know quite a few people in Germany who are wery vary of him, because the differences between him and Hitler are mostly cosmetical. With one hopefully important distinction -- Hitler was a good orator and persuasive writer. We can only hope that Trumps incoherent babbling wherever he opens his mouth will play against him strongly enough.
But that he is even viable candidate for presiding over a state with largest nuclear arsenal on the planet is… disturbing…
Charly:
It won’t. It hasn’t. Liberals dismissed Trump early on as a non-viable candidate, a joke, and look what happened. The people supporting him do not care that he’s a fraud and a liar. They don’t care in the slightest. He’s advancing a fascist agenda which thrills them, and that’s all they care about -- they are envisioning being the great white power, free to use and unleash that power to oppress the hell out of everyone else, and they think he can give them that.
Saad
This is frankly a battle we lost. Political correctness used to be a term of art to describe the effort to remove bias and discriminatory terms from language. As such it was a useful and important term. Then the right started to use it as an insult and we never got it back again.
Charly
Count me in among them. This election isn’t just about the US electorate potentially fucking up the USA but about them potentially fucking up the world.
Caine:
I know. I only express a desperate hope that this will slow his gaining of new supporters enough so he does not get elected. A hope to which I cling in order not to despair, because if that fascist gets to power, WW3 might happen in our lifetime, and another worldwide economic crisis will happen for sure.
Honestly, at this moment in time, any country turning more right.wing scares me. The bigger and more influential, the worse.
European countries have been turning right for a while now. I’m terrified of Merkel losing any and all power. Trump’s presidency wouldn’t be end of the world as we know it, but it would be another turn for the worse. I’m afraid it would only encourage European bigots.
It’s actually worse than that.
While the comparisons between Trump and Hitler are, of course, scarily apt, it’s not entirely invalid to compare Clinton to Hindenburg.
A country built on racism, with racism embedded in every institution of society, has been suffering from protracted economic malaise. A lot of people are on edge; they worry about losing their livelihoods and their place in society. Those underlying fears are real, even though they’re so caught up in bigotry that it’s virtually impossible to untangle them.
In comes a fascist contender for the Presidency who exploits both the real economic fears and the racism and in the process tangles them further— he uses minorities as a scapegoat, tells people that their economic fears are caused by minorities, riles up racism and makes it as mainstream as he can. He is, obviously, a major threat to the country and the world.
But the person best poised to defeat him is a staunch conservative who is at most lukewarm when it comes to supporting social justice. While he exploits people’s economic fears to actively promote racism, his strongest opponent simply ignores them. She is no fascist and has absolutely no intention of actively advancing a racist agenda within our borders (although she’s a die-hard colonialist, so no guarantee for people not resident in the United States) and she certainly won’t seize any sort of dictatorial powers, but she will gradually erode democracy to the point where a future fascist will be able to take power easily. And the left is supporting her, because what other option do we have?