August 16-19, 2017: American Nazi Party Approves of Trump Comments on Charlottesville

 

8/16/17: If you love Trump you assume The New York Times is fake news. Still, the Times tends to quote actual people. If those people are ever misquoted, they seek retraction. 

 

Head of American Nazi Party approves of Trump statement. 

At the Times, reporters begin coverage for the day by defining what the alt-right is and what it stands for. It is “anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights.” (That sounds a lot like the Republican Party.) Leaders of the movement believe “higher education is ‘only appropriate for a cognitive elite’ and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships.” 

(I think we can assume the alt-right does not believe dark-skinned people are part of the “cognitive elite.”) 

The alt-right is obsessed with a fear of “white genocide.” The Times explains: 

“White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by the Jews,” according to Ryan Lenz, editor of Hatewatch, for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

 

Many neo-Nazi types in Charlottesville carried shields painted with a “14.” The number stands for fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” 

The slogan was created by David Lane, currently serving a 190-year prison sentence for murdering Jewish radio host Alan Berg.

There are Americans who admire Nazism. And many admire Trump. 

 

Well then, who did enjoy Trump’s performance the day before? “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth,” David Duke tweets. He’s a former leader of the K.K.K. 

Richard Spencer, head of the American Nazi Party, is also impressed. “Trump’s statement was fair and down to earth,” says Spencer. 

Pretty much everyone else is aghast. The commandant of the Marine Corps tweets that there is “no place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC. Our core values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment frame the way Marines live and act.” This statement makes me proud to say I’m a former Marine.

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8/17/17: Julius Krein, founder of American Affairs, explains in The New York Times how he became a Trump supporter. He admits watching one of Trump’s campaign rallies. “I was riveted,” he says. He supported Candidate Trump in dozens of articles and TV appearances. 

Now he admits he was wrong. 

I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the forty-fifth president. Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. For months, despite increasing chaos and incoherence pouring out of this White House, I have given Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt.

 

He tried to convince himself that Trump wasn’t  a racist and wasn’t catering to racists. “It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves. Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes.” (See: 8/16/17.)

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8/18/17: It’s a sad day for “alt-right” types (see: 8/15/17). Steve Bannon, self-proclaimed voice of the movement, is ousted as chief strategist for the Trump administration. 

Alex Marlow, editor in chief at Breitbart News, explains the frustration right-wing extremists are feeling with Bannon being tossed: 

The president was buoyed to election by capturing the hearts and minds of a populist, nationalist movement. A lot of it was anti-Wall Street, anti-corporatist, anti-establishment. And now we’re seeing that a lot of these guys remaining inside the White House are exactly the opposite of what we told you you were going to get.

 

Here, the typical liberal might pose a question: What fool was stupid enough to believe the GOP establishment, or billionaire Donald J. Trump – would turn on Wall Street and multinational corporations? 

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8/19/17: The White House announces that the President and the First Lady will not be attending the Kennedy Center Honors program scheduled for December. “The president and first lady have decided not to participate in this year’s activities to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction.” 

Good job, Mr. President! You’re finally thinking of others! 

Oh…wait. 

Honorees for lifetime work in art, music, dance, film, television and culture make it clear, in light of Trump’s Charlottesville remarks, they will skip a White House gala normally held in conjunction with the awards. Three of five honorees have said they’d not attend. 

Carmen de Lavallade, a dancer and choreographer, 86, explains her decision to bow out. “In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in,” she says, “and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House.” 

So: The gala was going to lack gala. A fourth honoree LL Cool J hadn’t said for sure whether he’d attend. 

The fifth, Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan, said she’d show up, but only to press the president on his immigration policies. 

Trump chickens out.

May 29, 2018: Why Do Bigots like Roseanne Barr Gravitate toward Trump?

 

5/29/18: It’s a sad day for the president. His favorite TV show has been canceled after Roseanne Barr goes on a Twitter rampage every bit as unhinged as any of his own. 

Barr’s meltdown begins when she responds to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama. Barr describes Jarrett’s looks: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.” That’s the first nail in Barr’s coffin, a racist twofer, combining a spritz of anti-Muslim hate with 1870s-style denigration of African Americans. 

 

We all make mistakes – but not anti-Semitic mistakes. 

Suddenly aware that her “joke” might have been poorly received, Barr apologizes. Still, apologizing can be hard if you have sawdust for brains. Barr decides the best way to fight fire is to pour gasoline on it and hold her Twitter fingers in the flames. The second nail in her career coffin is an anti-Semitic tweet. First, Barr labels Chelsea Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton.” Then she claims she is married to a nephew of George Soros, a liberal Jewish financier. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: See 11/3/19 and 8/20/20, for examples of QAnon anti-Semitism infecting the party of Trump.

 

Ms. Clinton gets wind and politely points out, via Twitter, that while the nephews of Mr. Soros may be fine individuals she cannot say. She is not married to any of them or all of them. 

Barr picks up a third nail and tries to hammer it home. Before she can stop herself Barr’s nimble fingers are tapping away again. “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!” she faux apologizes. “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” 

That is true. We all make mistakes. We just don’t all make anti-Semitic mistakes. I once ran into the back of a car driven by one of my former students. It was the only wreck I’ve caused in fifty years. It was a mistake. 

It was not an anti-Semitic mistake.

 

A large part of Barr’s problem boils down to the same kind of profound ignorance we see in the president. A bare minimum of fact-checking shows Soros was born in Hungary on August 12, 1930. This would make him eight years old when World War II began, fourteen when Germany surrendered. 

In other words, Ms. Barr was falling for and spreading the kind of misinformation that circulates regularly on the internet. In November 2016, for example, Snopes, the fact-checking site, debunked a rumor that Soros had once been an officer in the dreaded SS, the military arm of the Nazi regime. 

That would have been quite a trick for a boy of fourteen.

Nope: Not George Soros.

 

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz but was not found out for seventy years.

Suppose Barr wanted to look under a few rocks and find some actual Nazis to tweet-worry about? She need look no further than Richard B. Spencer, a really big fan of President Trump. (See also: 5/31/18.) 

Or she might consider the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. That would be an obvious place to start. Back in 2016, he had this to say: 

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

 

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

 

What Suhayda was saying was this: “We are bigots. We all know that. We’re members of the American Nazi Party! But if we’re smart about how we act we can make it hard for people who aren’t bigots to prove that we are. Are we? Sure. And Trump is our kind of guy.”

For some reason American Nazis gravitate toward Trump.