Let me show you some pictures of the alt-right and you decide if Hillary was right or wrong to call them a “basket of deplorables”. But first about me, so you know where I’m coming from and why Trump’s Alt-Right love bothers me.
I learned about the alt-right at an early age, back in the 1950s. Because the alt-right ran Mississippi then, and Mississippi is where I grew up. In fact, the alt-right pretty much ran the whole South. Of course we had other names for it. As words go, alt-right is a pretty new invention.
The Alt-Right is now part of Trump’s campaign, thanks to his new campaign manager, Steve Bannon and the online rag he runs, Breitbart.com. Breitbart, by the way, proudly accepted the “Alt-Right” label after Hillary gave her speech about Trump’s alt-right supporters in Las Vegas. Here was their headline, the day after:
Now the alt-right is embracing the very words Hillary used: “basket of deplorables”. This is an instagram courtesy of Donald Trump, Jr:
Donald Jr. said this:
A friend sent me this. Apparently I made the cut as one of the Deplorables😂😂😂 All kidding aside I am honored to be grouped with the hard working men and women of this great nation that have supported @realdonaldtrump and know that he can fix the mess created by politicians in Washington.
Well, what’s wrong with the picture. Go ahead and tell me. You’ve got 15 seconds . . .
Times up.
What’s wrong is the little green cartoon character peering over Donald Trump’s shoulder. His name is Pepe the frog, and he isn’t just a dominant alt-right meme. He’s come to represent the Nazi wing of the alt-right.
But it isn’t just Donald Trump Jr. happily júmping into Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”. Trump cheerleader David Duke, who is a Nazi and Klansman rolled into one, tweeted this:
Trump once claimed to know nothing about David Duke, which got a Politfact “pants on fire” rating. Duke has been around a long, long time. This is a December 25, 1989 Newsweek, back when Duke almost became the Republican Governor of Louisiana:
Now in my Mississippi the David Duke types used to look like this, back in the late 1860s and 1870s:
The historian Stephen Budiansky writes this about them in his book of southern white terrorism, The Bloody Shirt:
A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges legislators, sheriffs, constables, majors, county commissioners and other officerholders whose only crime was to have been elected.
We don’t have to guess about what kind of world Trump’s alt-right wants to create. After all their terrorism was successful and as a result they ran things in my part of the world for nearly a hundred years. These are the kind of schools they created for black people in the Mississippi Delta:
The exterior of the schools looked like this.
This is what bus transportation looked like in the alt-right South. Note the waiting room sign. And once an African American made it onto the bus they sat at the back, behind a curtain.
People seem to forget that the alt-right once ran everything. And what they are pissed about is that they lost control. To them, Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” says they are going to get control back and take us all back to the America they love. Like this America:
They want their America back. And they’ve been angry about losing it for a very long time. This is a photograph I took at a KKK rally against Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1989. They hate Morris Dees because he tracks white supremacist groups and sues them whenever he can. He now has Hate Watch, which documents their crimes and alerts the public to the danger. You should read this 2014 Hatewatch article, about how the alt-right murdered 100 people world wide in the first five years of the Obama administration.
The alt-right is still fighting to “get their country back”. Or listen to the words of “trojan cowboy” who blogs on Stormfront. (Which is the same alt-right (ie Nazi) website that David Duke writes on).
Trump is the only chance of turning Washington D.C. on its head. That is the only way forward other than a complete economic and governmental collapse. Hitler had to work with Hindenburg for a year before he finally got enough power to seize the state. It may be worth voting for Trump to get Hollywood scum to emigrate to Canada like Cher, the Negress Whoopi Goldberg, the Negro Al Sharpton, the Whigress Mylie Cyrus and the Jewish Princess Rosanne Barr.
Back in the day trojancowboy’s alt-right Germany looked like this:
In 1942, my daddy and a bunch of his buddies had to travel half-way across the world to fight the alt-right. Here is my father’s weather squadron in North Africa. They provided the weather information needed for American bombers to hit the oil refineries, industrial targets and cities of the European alt-right powers.
This is a German alt-right flag that was captured by Delma Edwards and his friends. Mr. Edwards was from my home town in Mississippi and he landed at Normandy and fought with Patton all the way into the heart of Germany. I interviewed him back in 2001.
Fighting the alt-right in WWII came with a big price tag.
It was no better in the Pacific where we had to fight the Japanese alt-right. I got this picture from a black veteran with an engineering unit in the Pacific.
After WWII a lot of black veterans decided that if you could fight the alt-right in Germany and Japan, you could do the same thing back home in America. They came home and did that and now we call it the Civil Rights Movement. One of the leaders was Medgar Evers, a paratrooper in WWII. He was from my home state — Mississippi — and he paid the ultimate price, cut down by an alt-right bullet. But eventually African American men and women won signficant changes in the laws of the United States and as a result brought freedom to Mississippi (and the rest of the US).
Now the alt-right wants to take that freedom away. Mine, yours and everyones. Because an alt-right America means only the alt-right gets to decide. There is another word that’s been used for this way of thinking. It’s called fascism.
They are on the march here in America, and they are on the march in Europe. Here is an alt-right march in Sweden that I photographed in 2011. They weren’t calling themselves alt-right on that particular day.
The alt-right in both Europe and the US are real fond of this guy. They see him as a real man. And a real leader. And they think his Russia is all-white. Which would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
So they are pulling for Donald Trump because for some odd reason they think he is as manly as Putin. This is the way someone in the (Nazi) alt-right drew Trump last year.
You’ve seen the pictures. Now you can jump to the bottom and take the poll.
Or. If you don’t yet know what the Alt-Right is, I suggest you go straight to the source and read Milo Yiannopoulos — chief propagandists at Breitbart — and his primer called “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right.” In Milo’s words:
The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.
So why does Milo say the conservative establishment is wrong to refer to this movement as “the worst dregs of human society”?
Because they aren’t all the same, according to Milo. Lots of them are good guys and really intelligent.
Milo goes on to identify four factions in the Alt-Right: The Intellectuals, The Natural Conservatives, THE MEME TEAM (guys behind Pepe the Nazi frog), and ‘1488rs’.
To sum it up — if you don't want to plow through Milo’s hagiography of the alt-right — the intellectuals are white supremacists who don’t really believe in democratic traditions or institutions. “Natural conservatives” want to protect white cultural identity in the mode of Pat Buchanan (although he is the most liberal of this group). And the Meme Team are irreverent computer geeks who think its fun to ridicule people for their ethnicity, sex, etc. and they like to make fun of the holocaust on top of it. But its all good fun, and quite harmless according to Milo. The “Meme Team” are the ones who keep putting the internet meme character “Pepe the frog into his Nazi costuming.
And the ‘1488rs’? Again, let’s listen to Milo:
Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots. Calmer members of the alternative right refer darkly to these people as the “1488ers,” and for all their talk of there being “no enemies to the right,” it’s clear from the many conversations we’ve had with alt-righters that many would rather the 1488ers didn’t exist . . .
Why “1488”? It’s a reference to two well-known Neo Nazi slogans, the first being the so-called 14 Words: “We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children.” The second part of the number, 88, is a reference to the 8th letter of the alphabet – H. Thus, “88” becomes “HH” which becomes “Heil Hitler.”
So according to Milo, the 1488ers — hard core Nazis — make up ¼ of the alt-right. Pepe the Nazi frog popping up behind Donald Trump in that Donald Jr post just about says it all.
Deplorable? You tell me.