The Washington Post’s David Weigel has a frightening story up today about how the white supremacist crowd is more fired up than ever now that Donald Trump has hired Breitbart’s Steve Bannon to run his campaign. (Note: Weigel refers to these folks as “racialists” — is that the media’s new PC term for racists and bigots?)
For example, well-known racist and white supremacist Jared Taylor praises Trump’s further push to the racist, white supremacist, far-alt-right, citing Trump’s first ad about scary hordes of immigrants as proof that the white supremacists have finally come into the mainstream thanks to Donald Trump.
From his Fairfax County home, Taylor has edited the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance and organized racialist conferences under the “AmRen” banner. He said that Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people,” suggesting that winning 65 percent of the white vote would overwhelm any Democratic gains with minorities.
Taylor and his white supremacist pals are also over-the-moon in their hope that the rise of Trump and Bannon as new leaders of the Republican Party is the “latest sign for white nationalists, once dismissed as fringe, that their worldview was gaining popularity and that the old Republican Party was coming to an end.”
The article also points out that the alt-right sees Trump’s latest “pivot” to Bannon as streamlining their racists arguments, not moderating them: “it has promoted the people who agree with the alt-right, not a bid for the center.”
If you aren’t already scared by Jared Taylor being quoted in Weigel’s piece in praise of Trump’s latest strategy, perhaps the appearance of the disgraced Jason Richwine will do the trick. You may recall back in 2013 that Richwine published a study on immigration that posited, among many other offensive things, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites.” Here’s what Richwine has to say about Trump in the WaPo article:
“I’m honestly delighted that Trump is putting a team together that has such reasonable views on immigration,” said Jason Richwine, a policy analyst who left the Heritage Foundation after a backlash to his study of race and IQ and who has appeared on Breitbart’s XM show. “This was almost impossible to imagine even just a year ago. Whatever you might think of his campaign in general, it’s clear that Trump has opened up space to talk about immigration in a way we haven’t been able to before.”
That’s right. We’ve never been able to talk about Latino immigrants as rapists and thugs and killers before. We’ve never been able to have “reasonable” talk about building a wall that Mexico will pay for. We’ve never been able to ban judges from cases because of their Mexican heritage. For Richwine and others of his racist ilk, thank goodness we can all now say what we really think about immigrants!
Weigel quotes another white supremacist, Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDare.com — named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in America, who is hopeful that Trump will lead the GOP to “Southernize the white vote.” According to Brimelow, the goal is to “have everybody in the country voting the way that Southern whites vote.”
White supremacists are also thrilled by Trump’s recent appeals to African Americans. There’s been a lot of talk on this site about how these appeals aren’t really meant for African Americans, but for white voters who might be worried about supporting someone who is racist. However, I believe that Trump has bungled this so badly that the only white voters who are buoyed by his latest “outreach” to African Americans are the white racist crazies who already support him, as evidenced by this comment from the WaPo article:
At Trump’s rally in Charlotte, one of the first of the Bannon era, the message was sinking in. Frances Johnson, 68, said that the polls were not reflecting Trump’s real level of support and that she sometimes emailed the campaign with ideas on how to change that. The pitch to black voters, she said, was smart.
“I really don’t think that African Americans want to be stuck where they are,” Johnson said. “They’re basically glorified slaves — they get free this, free that, free this, free that, and they can’t get a good job and depend on the government. What else do you call it?”
I agree with Larry Wilmore when he stated recently that “Donald Trump has stopped being funny. He’s stopped being outrageous. He’s stopped being politically incorrect. He’s just downright dangerous.” In his latest column, Leonard Pitts quotes Wilmore and writes about how “tired” he is with writing about Donald Trump. But we have to point out that Trump’s scary campaign is getting scarier by the day. We cannot shrug off the the things that Trump is doing and saying. If this WaPo article doesn’t make you want to double-down on making sure that Hillary Clinton trounces Donald Trump in November, then I urge you to take a little break to think about that for a minute.
I’ll let Pitts have the last word:
I have passed on writing about so much of what Trump and his surrogates have said and done — there is simply not enough space or time. But it strikes me that there is a danger here subtler and more insidious than that posed by the candidate himself. By which I mean, the idea that we might learn to shrug off his epic coarseness, brazen mendacity, appalling ignorance, enormous narcissism and utter incompetence.
I don’t know that we can afford that luxury.
Granted, no one can maintain a state of perpetual outrage. And yet, accommodating yourself to Trumpism — getting used to it — feels too much like surrender, like giving up on reasoned discourse, civil dissent, coherent logic, and other theoretical north stars of political debate.