It’s no secret that white supremacists have taken up residence in the Trump campaign. By this point, who could not notice that Trump has made white supremacists feel right at home, in fact he’s made racism & bigotry cornerstones of his campaign. He’s called Mexicans “rapists,” pledged he would build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and ban Muslims from the entering the country. He has even had his surrogates float the idea of a tracking-ID program for Muslims, an electronic version of the Nazi concentration camps tattoo-classification systems.
And if that’s not offensive enough, Trump has retweeted white supremacist groups’ messages, in fact, a tweet from a white nationalist group scrolled across the jumbo ticker tape at the Republican National Convention. But that’s not all.
Trump has even refused to denounce an endorsement from former KKK leader, David Duke, who has since said, Trump has “inspired him to run for office again.” An original birther, Trump has even gone so far as accusing President Obama, whom he referred to by his middle name, “Hussein” as being the founder of the terrorist organization ISIS.
This hate speech is being amplified on the national stage by a Presidential candidate who is providing the means for racism to creep back into the mainstream. And civil rights experts are taking note. How could they not?
Experts say white supremacists see Trump campaign as "last stand"
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign are expressing ideas similar to those espoused by white supremacists, legal, media and civil rights experts say.
In addition, the experts said Wednesday, white supremacists are using the 2016 presidential elections to attempt to control the culture of politics.
"Many white supremacists see this as their last stand for controlling the country," Heidi Beirich, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said on a conference call with reporters
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Sophie Bjork-James, a Vanderbilt University lecturer and expert in white supremacist social movements, said white nationalists are attempting to increase their numbers through Trump's campaign. "They are organizing online to rebrand to respectable politics," she said. "Instead of being racist, they try to be respectable, but they are also using conspiracy theories to control the media through their social media handles for white nationalist ideas."
Trump didn't originally build this toxic political environment of course, Republican party leaders have been pandering to white supremacists for decades but generally have “favored more tepid language” in recent times to “create greater deniability if someone called them on their implicit racism and bigotry.” Trump’s “sharp-edged lingo from his experience in ‘reality TV’” is sending the message that it’s ok to be a racist again.
Donald Trump’s Incendiary Language
But it has been the Republican Party that has coyly courted right-wing extremists since the days of Richard Nixon and his “Southern strategy” which sought to pry working-class whites especially in the unreconstructed South away from the Democratic Party because of its support for civil rights laws that ended segregation. This pandering to the Southern white resistance to racial integration also appealed to many whites in the North, especially when framed as standing up for “liberty.”
This outreach to working- and middle-class whites continued through Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of many blacks as welfare cheats in the 1980s and George H.W. Bush’s highlighting violent black-on-white crime in his 1988 campaign. Then, with the election of Bill Clinton and the rise of right-wing talk radio in the early 1990s, white anger took on an openly militaristic style with armed “militias” forming across the country.
Heated rhetoric about “jack-booted” federal agents gave rise to the likes of Timothy McVeigh who lashed out at the U.S. government by bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.Though denying responsibility for such violence, the Republican Party kept on feeding this white anger by insisting that Democratic presidents were “illegitimate,” a theme used against both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who further angered many on the Right because of the color of his skin, his exotic name, and his Kenyan father’s Islamic religion.
Waiting for the grand wizard to take the stage
It is Trump’s campaign specifically this election season that has provided the real estate for white supremacists to “make their last stand.” By harkening back to a time when white supremacy was the norm and any discussion of alleviating racism was met with violent resistance, Trump’s movement to “Make America Great Again” has provided the space for white supremacists to freely wave their racist flags.
So seeing a confederate flag hanging at a Trump rally this evening in Florida, certainly comes as no surprise. And while the local venue security did force the Trump fans to remove the flag, the fact it was proudly hung by Trump supporters in the first place, says it all: the white supremacists are making their stand publicly and Republicans are enabling them to do so.
As President Obama alluded to and Hawking stated, “Trump is a demagogue who appeals to the lowest common denominator.” Those who refuse to fully denounce Trump are cowards and it is not going unnoticed.
History is watching.
Update: The press is increasingly becoming the target of Trump supporters’ rage at his rallies. Martin Gelin, reported the event in Florida is the worst he’s covered so far.