Trump said he would “make America great again”. I know something about the kind of America Trump wants for everyone, since I grew up in a place like the one he describes as “great”. Back in the 60s it was called Mississippi and the “alt-right” was known as the Ku Klux Klan. I now live in Sweden for much of the year and have some first-hand comparisons between the Old South Klan and contemporary European Nazis. And there’s not a dime’s worth of difference.
Trump’s white supremacist fellow travelers are a part of the same bunch, with just one difference: they have rebranded themselves as the “alt-right”. Lipstick on a pig.
And now Trump wants to “disavow” them? Only after the election?
Keep reading and I’ll tell you what I think of that. But first let me make sure you know who these people are and why it’s a false dichotomy to see the larger issue around Trump’s Electoral College win as one of racism versus economic angst.
Donald Trump will be the first President since Woodrow Wilson to openly promote a white supremacist world-view, so it’s little wonder that Nazis around the world are celebrating his election.
In Stockholm they marched last weekend, gathering at the symbolic heart of the Swedish State, a plaza called Mynttorget, which sits between the Parliament and the Castle of King Gustav VI. The gathering of 600 was the largest ever show of force by the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), which is only one of Sweden’s several Nazi groups.
The Nazis of the NMR had a message for the world:
According to a reporter from the anti-Nazi Expo magazine, Per Öberg, the Nazi group’s press chief, told the gathered crowd that Donald Trump’s election was a sign that a world revolution was beginning.
I somehow missed the news, otherwise I would have been at the counter-protest. Instead I spent a pleasant afternoon at Ikea, buying pillows and eating traditional Swedish Lox and potatoes with my wife in the Ikea cafeteria. A much nicer day than disrupting some hate-filled Nazis, but I would rather have fulfilled my civic duty at the protest.
I’ve seen these Nazis before, in exactly the same spot, which is when I took these photos. It was December 10, 2011. Nobel Prize Day, which is a big deal in Sweden. The Nazis deliberately chose the day when the world comes to Stockholm to celebrate achievements in science, literature and economics.
They were angry men with a small scattering of their angry women. Their faces were hard and hate-filled. If war is an extension of politics by other means — a truth articulated long ago by General Carl von Clausewitz of Prussia — then a Nazi march is a mid-way point between politics and war. They usually carry knives, they fight whenever they can and the threat of violence hangs in the air where they gather.
Nazis and their white supremacist nationalist allies are on the march throughout Europe, and the tempo has increased with Trump’s victory. The Swedish NGO/anti-Nazi magazine Expo was founded by Stig Larrson, creator of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other two books of the Millennium trilogy. Expo publishes studies on the far-right. In a paper called Patriotism and Patriarchy, they point out that the different shades of Nazis and white supremacist nationalists differ widely as to who their preferred object of hate might be. But there is one hate they all have in common — strong women.
Nationalism has many enemies, which can all be grouped under the term ”the Other”. These can include Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals, Jews, communists, transvestites or feminists, for example. The focus varies from country to country and from one political climate to another, but the rejection of feminists and women’s rights defenders is something that unites most nationalists. The role of women is primarily that of bearing the nation’s children and supporting men as the nation’s defenders
While Trump is hazy as to his preferred objects of hate — with the exception of Mexicans and Muslims — he is clear in his disrespect for women. He is probably the most openly misogynistic President since far back in the 19th Century. In Trump, the Nazis/Klan of our world see justification for both their hatred of various minorities as well as their stereotypical and spiteful view of women.
Nazi faces are not just my present reality in Europe, they are also the ghosts of my Mississippi past, where the KKK committed regular atrocities throughout the 1960s.
The best description I’ve seen of these men is in Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. She describes how an an ex-sheriff named Mr. Steward, a “quiet, bitter man” arrives one night to warn her grandmother that the Klan will be riding, and that her Uncle should be careful.
“Annie, tell Willie he better lay low tonight. A crazy nigger messed with a white lady today. Some of the boys’ll be coming over later.” Even after the slow drag of years, I remember the sense of fear which filled my mouth with hot, dry air, and made my body light.
Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday. Boys? It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No rather men who were covered with graves’ dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations.
“Those cement faces and eyes of hate”. That is the Klan. This is a Nazi. That is a white supremacist. We cannot let these men choose another name for themselves — alt-right — to hide from their past evil and deceive the naive about their hateful intentions for our common future.
Oliva Nuzzi is a political reporter for the Daily Beast and covered Donald Trump for the duration of the campaign. She had an op-ed in The Washington Post on November 23: Five myths about the alt-right. She debunks the claim that the Alt-right is a new kind of anti-establishment conservative right.
While the amorphous term “alt-right” can be helpful for characterizing a certain kind of young white nationalist who’s technically savvy and culturally literate, as distinct from the unreconstructed racists and anti-Semites of yore, the distance is shorter than they would have you believe. At a National Policy Institute conference in Washington this month, excited members of the alt-right shouted: “Hail our people! Hail victory!,” and Tila Tequila, the Vietnamese American former reality-TV star who’s been praising Hitler on Twitter for the past year, was photographed performing a Nazi salute with two young men. The alt-right is the same old hate, in other words, just with trendier packaging.
The “alt-right” gathering with these Nazi salutes was put together by Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who coined the term “alt-right”. At times he scarcely attempts to hide his Nazi sentiments. The Washington Post profiled Spencer while reporting on his gathering — here’s a sample:
As the dinner neared its end, and with the TV cameras all downstairs, he explained the schedule for the next day’s conference. Then, as Spencer considered how they should mark its finish, he smiled and offered a joke.
“Let’s party like it’s 1933,” he declared, referencing the year Hitler was appointed Germany’s chancellor and the Nazis embarked on the creation of their own ethno-state.
I’ve been paying close attention to America’s Klan and Nazi movements since the violent neo-Nazi group The Order murdered progressive radio talk-show host Alan Berg outside his Denver home in 1984. The Order was an especially violent off-shoot of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in Idaho.
I’ve come to the same conclusion as Olivia Nuzzi: alt-right is simply a rebranding of neo-Nazi. A key part of the “alt-right” pretense that they are different from Nazis is their emphasis on what they regard as “irreverent humor”. Here is what Nuzzi says about that:
A frequent theme among the movement is its insistence on needling the mainstream for giggles. “The alt-right are just adolescent trolls who spout garbage for shock value,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld told his audience in late August. Meanwhile, NPR described members of the alt-right as those who, “for fun and notoriety . . . like to troll, prank and provoke.”
But there’s more here than cheeky irreverence. The alt-right’s swift ascent occurred in part because its members bombarded journalists, particularly Jewish or nonwhite ones, with racist and anti-Semitic messages and imagery on social media, especially Twitter . There, they praised Hitler with a twinge of irony, the way hipsters drink PBR, and they corrupted the harmless meme Pepe the Frog by dressing him up as a Wehrmacht soldier. They told adversaries they’d be heading to the ovens . It was a real riot.
When I googled Pepe the Frog and Nazi, this was the 7th most common image that popped up. What kind of person is okay with a group that creates images like this?
Obviously Donald Trump is okay with it. This depiction of Trump’s Deplorables was the 5th most common image on the google search. It was sent out via Instagram by his son, Donald Trump, Jr. and shows the Trump klan taking ownership of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” label for the the “alt-right” (Nazi/Klan). And taking ownership of the Pepe the frog meme.
If you have any doubt about the anti-semitism of the alt-right, the images here are the #1 and #2 hits when you google images for “Pepe the frog — Nazi”.
The Pepe the frog meme is part of a bizarre “alt-right” pseudo-religion, the Cult of Kek, which is a reference to an Egyptian god, an in-joke among the alt-right misfits and white supremacists using the 4chan message board. Essentially they created a joke religion around Pepe, who is seen as a manifestation of the Egyptian frog-headed god, Kuk — also spelled Kek.
I’m pointing this out to underscore the context of the Trump Deplorables instagram that Donald Jr. broadcast on social media. It was not a joke gone wrong. It was deliberate messaging to their “alt-right” base. Listen to how Richard Spencer talked about Kek (symbolised by Pepe) and Trump to his “alt-right” gathering in Washington. This is from a transcript of Spencer’s speech:
But even though we always took Trump seriously, there was still a moment of unreality – or perhaps too painfully intense reality – when the state of Pennsylvania was called for Donald Trump, the moment when we knew Kek had smiled upon us, that meme magic was real. And though these terms are used half-jokingly, they represent something truly important — the victory of will. We willed Donald Trump into office, made this dream into reality. If you will it, it is no dream, a quote I’m sure our friends at the Anti-Defamation League know well.
And this is only the beginning.
You can’t make this stuff up. The quote Spencer uses, by the way, is from Theodor Herzl, one of Zionism’s founders. Another sick alt-right joke.
The joking cynicism used by the “alt-right” is one way they attract disaffected young white males. If we are going to beat this ideology, the left needs to rid itself of cynicism. It’s never a force for good anyway, and it plays right into the hands of “alt-right” neo-Nazis.
In a Daily Beast article in May of 2016, Olivia Nuzzi explained how Pepe transformed from an innocent internet meme that was even used by Katy Perry to become the cartoon poster-boy of America’s Nazi movement. This is what she learned from an “alt-right” Nazi going by the name of “@JaredTSwift”:
“Most memes are ephemeral by nature, but Pepe is not,” @JaredTSwift told me. “He’s a reflection of our souls, to most of us. It’s disgusting to see people (‘normies,’ if you will) use him so trivially. He belongs to us. And we’ll make him toxic if we have to.”
@JaredTSwift said some of the support for Trump was in jest, but for most of his cohorts, it’s sincere. He even claimed to have voted for Trump in the primary himself, wherever it is he lives, and said he’d vote for him in the general, too.
“In a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” he said. “Trump’s online support has been crucial to his success, I believe, and the fact is that his biggest and most devoted online supporters are white nationalists. Now, we’ve pushed the Overton window. People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re setting up for a massive cultural shift.”
The “Overton window” referred to by “@JaredTSwift” is a term used by commentators to describe the range of ideas the public will accept. And yes the Nazis together with Donald Trump have very much enlarged the Overton window.
A week before the election, someone burned a black church in my home state, in Greenville, Mississippi. “Vote Trump” graffiti was found beneath the charred windows.
Mayor Errick Simmons said he spoke to some of the church’s 200 congregants who were fearful and felt intimidated. They felt the vandalism was not just an attack on the church, but on the black community, he said.
“It happened in the ’50s, it happened in the ’60s, but we’re in 2016 and that should not happen,” he said.
Greenville faced another race-based attack in September when someone painted the n-word on the city’s boat ramp, Simmons said, He ordered city workers to paint over the pejorative, he said.
Perhaps it isn’t fair to say the public’s range of acceptance has been enlarged to include Nazi rhetoric (I don’t think it has yet). But Nazis themselves (“alt-right”) certainly feel emboldened by Trump and his campaign. In the ten days after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 826 hate incidents directed toward groups that are commonly targeted by Nazis/Klan/white supremacists.
Many of these incidents happened in K-12 schools and colleges — 323 of them in just ten days. Those are only the ones that were reported. Our children are hearing the adult rhetoric swirling around Trump’s campaign and becoming bullies themselves. And the words are raw and nasty. I haven’t heard anything close to this level of public aggression since Mississippi in the 1960s. This is just one of the accounts from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
A woman from Louisiana submitted the following report: I was standing at a red light waiting to cross the street. A black truck with three white men pulled up to the red light. One of them yelled, “Fuck your black life!” The other two began to laugh. One began to chant “Trump!” as they drove away.
This election was very much about racial resentment. Michael Tesler is a political scientist who writes in The Washington Post about the race and politics in the 2016 election.
Racial and ethnocentric attitudes were deeply implicated in Donald Trump’s remarkable rise to the White House. Racial resentment, anti-Muslim attitudes, and white identity, were all much stronger predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 primaries than they were for prior Republican nominees.
Donald Trump made racial attitudes more important in the general election, too.
In fact, no other factor explained the education gap in white support for Trump as well as racial and ethnocentric attitudes — not partisanship, not ideology, not authoritarianism, not sexism, not income, not economic anxiety.
In another article he shows that white grievance politics has long been eroding support for the Democratic Party among white voters.
Others, including Ian Reifowitz at Daily Kos have argued that there was no whitelash as described by Van Jones, that Trump’s win can be explained simply as a matter of economic concerns. Concerns that went unanswered by the Clinton Campaign.
It’s a debate we should be having, because the data is saying contradictory things. But we cannot afford to have this debate at the expense of overlooking the influence of race, white supremacy and the “alt-right” on this election. Dangerous forces have been unleashed, and there are many Americans who quite rightly feel vulnerable as a result.
Just as importantly, to say this is an either-or thing is very mis-leading. It is both. It is economics and it is white grievance centered on race. They are increasingly intertwined issues.
Listen to how Richard Spencer frames his issues — remember, he invented the rebranding word, “alt-right. When making his pitch, he doesn’t lead with white supremacy. He leads with economics. Again, from the transcript of his Washington speech.
Why is something as simple as starting a family, owning a house, and leaving a legacy to your children seen as an almost impossible dream for so many Americans? Why must there be two incomes for a family simply to break even? . . .
It’s not just that this society makes it impossible for us collectively to accomplish great things. It’s that collectively, we can’t even accomplish small things anymore. We take for granted our culture is filth, that the mass transit won’t work, that the cities are rotted out from within . . .
To say “Make America Great Again” is both radically pessimistic and boyishly optimistic at the same time. It is an admission America is not what it once was, that it is no longer that nation capable of achieving what it once did. Even liberals at some level know this, as they occasionally pay wistful tributes to the early 1960s America of the moon race and the middle class lifestyle, while conveniently forgetting that American society was 90% white at the time.
As Europeans, we are, uniquely, at the center of history . . . For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands . . . We were not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to pollute the soil of this planet. We were meant to overcome--overcome all of it. Because that’s natural for us.
Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.
That last line — “Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail Victory — got quoted a lot and mashed together in the reporting with Tila Tequila’s Nazi salute. Trump was finally forced to do something about his “alt-right” baggage. On November 22, Trump said this about the “alt-right” during an interview with the staff of the New York Times.
“I don’t want to energize the group and I disavow the group . . . if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why.”
What kind of a strange word is disavow anyway? Remember, Trump used exactly the same word when asked during the primary about one of his biggest supporters, Nazi/Klansman David Duke.
"David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years," Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK," Trump added. "Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now."
Whatever disavow means to Donald Trump, David Duke understood it didn’t mean he had to get off the Trump-train. He recorded robo-calls for his Senate run with the message, “Unless massive immigration is stopped now, we’ll be outnumbered and outvoted in our own nation. It’s happening. Look at the Super Bowl salute to the black Panther cop killers. It’s time to stand up and vote for Donald Trump for president and vote for me, David Duke, for the U.S. Senate.”
The Oxford Dictionary of the English language says disavow means: “Deny any responsibility or support for”. So to disavow something is not necessarily to condemn it — but simply to say you take no responsibility for it.
It was widely reported that Trump both disavowed and condemned the “alt-right”. But his milquetoast condemnation had to be subsequently pried out of him by a reporter referred to only as “unknown” in the Times transcript. Trump did not use the word condemn until he was pressed.
Look at the Times interview transcript (Reince Priebus was also in the meeting):
UNKNOWN: Mr. President-elect, I wanted to ask you, there was a conference this past weekend in Washington of people who pledged their allegiance to Nazism.
TRUMP: Boy, you are really into this stuff, huh?
PRIEBUS: I think we answered that one right off the bat.
UNKNOWN: Are you going to condemn them?
TRUMP: Of course I did, of course I did.
PRIEBUS: He already did.
UNKNOWN: Are you going to do it right now?
TRUMP: Oh, I see, maybe you weren’t here. Sure. Would you like me to do it here? I’ll do it here. Of course I condemn. I disavow and condemn.
Remember Trump’s fiery rhetoric throughout the campaign, directed at Mexicans, Muslims, women, liberals, Hillary Clinton? Rhetoric that said Black America was a hell-hole. Rhetoric attacking elites, foreign countries and “the establishment”. (All of them “alt-right” themes by the way). Remember how he said Hillary Clinton was a bigot because she dared to attack the “alt-right” as a “basket of deplorables”. Then compare it to the Times transcript to see how he condemns actual, real American Nazis.
It says something.
Just as it said something when Trump appointed Breitbart News CEO to become the CEO of the Trump campaign. Mother Jones reported this after Trump brought Bannon on board.
By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the "alt-right," a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee's favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.
"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.
On August 10, 2016, Steve Bannon interviewed Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopolous on his Sirius Radio Program. Yiannopolous said this to Bannon about Trump and the “alt-right”:
“What is really happening is this: The Trump phenomenon wasn’t created by Trump. Trump has taken advantage of frustration with globalism and globalization, frustration with open borders, frustration with wages being depressed, frustration with law and order … and in addition to that, concerns about freedom of speech, about western culture being preserved from immigration from certain bits of the world, and the total rejection of political correctness. These things have sort of congealed to become something that we now call the Alt-Right. And that represents at least half of the Republican base, and probably a lot more than that.”
Bannon’s full-on embrace of the “alt-right” began in March of 2016, when he published Milo Yiannopolous’ apologia, An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right. Milo wrote that the “alt-right” was superior to neo-Nazis of the old school, in part because the “alt-right” is brighter:
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.
And now Trump has chosen Steven Bannon to be his White House chief strategist. The man who nurtured the neo-Nazis of the “alt-right”. The ultimate opportunist according to reporting by The New Yorker:
As Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Breitbart, told me earlier this year, when I was researching a piece on Bannon, “When Sarah Palin was on the rise, he had found a way to become a part of that circle. When the Tea Party was on the rise, he seemed to be right there in that circle. When it was going to be Ted Cruz, he was there. When it was going to be Ben Carson for a hot second, he was there. He’s been someone who’s been in pursuit of that pipeline to power for a long time now.”
Despite his “disavowal” and “condemnation” of the “alt-right”, Trump did not disavow Steven Bannon in his New York Times interview.
I’ve known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist, or alt-right, or any of the things that we can, you know, the terms we can use, I wouldn’t even think about hiring him.
Ben Shapiro a former Breitbart reporter, parted ways with Steven Bannon over Trump and the “alt-right”. In a Slate interview, he has some advice for how the left should approach Bannon’s move to the White House.
I have no evidence that Steve’s an anti-Semite. I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead, and that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.
. . .
I’ve been as critical of Steve Bannon as anybody in the media. I was the first critic of Bannon because when I left Breitbart in March, I specifically named Bannon as a nefarious influence at Breitbart, by name. And yet, I was forced last week to defend Steve Bannon. I think that he’s a terrible person. But because the left can’t just say, “This is a guy who made way for the alt-right, which is quite terrible, and he’s doing a real disservice to the nature of the country by doing so.” The left had to accuse him personally of racism and anti-Semitism, and they had to overstep. This is the big mistake.
Democrats can’t undo the election of Donald Trump. But they need to oppose Steve Bannon’s appointment in every way possible and do whatever can be done to drive a wedge between Trump and his “alt-right” supporters.
Perhaps Shapiro is right, that we shouldn’t waste time calling Bannon a racist or anti-semite, because he doesn’t appear to be overtly racist or anti-semitic in his personal dealings. But it frankly doesn’t matter if he is a racist in his personal life or not. His big crime was written down in black and white in the pages of Breitbart News and is there for everyone to see — energizing the neo-Nazis of the “alt-right” and giving them access to the Republican Party.
I don’t know why Republicans aren’t more upset about this.
But we need to express our outrage in clear and pragmatic ways that will drive Bannon from the White House and make the “alt-right” a burden on Trump. Make them something Trump — the ultimate opportunist — is forced to get rid of.
The Nazis of the “alt-right” call Trump the “God Emperor”. Some do it as an in-joke. Some are half-serious. A few are actually serious. But their leadership has no illusions about Trump. “Alt-right” leader Richard Spencer sees Trump as a way to tear the system down, including the “moribund conservative movement”. But he also sees Trump as little more than an opportunist using the “alt-right” and in turn, they are using him:
What are we fighting for is a “new normal,” a moral consensus we insist upon.
Donald Trump is a step towards this new normal. But even he is deeply compromised by the perversions that define this decadent society.
The real story, however, is happening behind closed doors where some of America’s billionaires are using both Trump and the “alt-right” to advance their cause.
Hedge fund billionaire (and computer coder) Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca are the personification of these extremely rich people. The Mercers funded Breitbart, they funded the “Clinton Cash” attack on the Clinton Foundation, and they funded Ted Cruz before changing horses and backing Trump. They are also the reason that Trump hired both Steve Bannon as his Campaign CEO and Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager. It’s hard to believe they aren’t still calling the shots, given the number of Wall Street types staffing the new Trump administration — despite his supposed opposition to Wall Street.
This is the way it always works with Nazism, fascist white supremacy and American versions such as the Klan. Some of the super-rich back these people because it protects their wealth. The Nazis always go after “the other”. They never attack the rich. If you doubt me, read Richard Spencer’s speech — the one that forced Trump to finally “disavow” him. Despite his attacks on neoliberal economics, he laughs at the idea of “income inequality”, seeing it as proof that communism influences the left. The American “alt-right” is an ally of the rich, not their potential tormentor.
Putin turned from communism to fascism for the same reasons, it protects his wealth and privilege. It’s the reason Putin is backing the far-right across Europe. It doesn’t just help Russia advance its agenda. It also allows the filthy-rich of Russia to keep their stolen wealth.
This is a story the left needs to understand and understand quickly. We will beat these movements in the United States only by combining an economic message with support for a multi-racial America and an attack on white supremacy. We need to also go after the people who are funding this hate.
The white working class may have expressed their prejudice in the recent election. But they haven’t yet embraced the Nazi “alt-right”. It’s up to us to make sure they don’t.
I’ll write more about the tactics of this next Sunday.