Archive for the ‘Alt-right’ Category

Donald Trump’s ties to alt-right white supremacists are extensive. – Slate Magazine (blog)

White House Senior Adviser Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump has done more than any political figure in the United States to propagate the beliefs and court the support of the white supremacist "alt-right" movement, whose adherents held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, where a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. killed a nonviolent protester named Heather Heyer with his car. Here's an attempt at a comprehensive list of the ways Trump has promoted and benefitted from the movement.

(Note on nomenclature: I'm using the term white supremacist in some cases where others might use white nationalist. The self-identification distinction between the two groups is that many white nationalists claim that they believe the United States should be a culturally and politically white-dominated society because it has historically been so, not because whites are intrinsically superior. An avowedly white U.S. "ethnostate," though, is still one in which whites would maintain supremacy over nonwhites, so I believe white supremacist applies broadly. Also, regardless of what they may claim, many self-identified white nationalists are quite obviously racially prejudiced against nonwhites.)

Birtherism. Trump began insisting in 2011 that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States. He once said a "very credible source" had informed him that Obama's birth certificate was fraudulent and claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii to research the matter. Trump has also suggestedObama may be a Muslim who is sympathetic to the goals of groups like ISIS. (Obama is an American-born Christian.)

Steve Bannon. The former chairman of Breitbart News helped run Trump's campaign and is a senior White House adviser. Bannon once proudly described Breitbart as "the platform for the alt-right," and under his leadership the site published an infamous article which celebrated the work of several white supremacists, including Richard Spencer, who was one of the leaders of the Charlottesville rally and who made headlines for using Nazi slogans and gestures at a Washington, D.C. celebration of Trump's inauguration. (Breitbart also famously posted some of its stories under the heading "Black Crime.") Bannon has repeatedly and publicly endorsed The Camp of the Saints, a novel popular in white-pride circles in which black Americans, "dirty Arabs," and feces-eating Hindu rapists (among others) destroy civilization. The book refers to black individuals as "niggers" and "rats." Bannon has also reportedly praised a far-right French writer named Charles Maurras who was sentenced to life in prison after World War II for collaboration with Nazi occupiers. And he's complained publicly that too many tech CEOs are Asian American. And he reportedly told his ex-wife that he didn't want their children attending schools with significant Jewish enrollment.

Milo Yiannopoulos. The Nazi-fetishizing former Breitbart staffer who co-wrote the white-supremacist article described above can thank Bannon, who has called his work "valuable," for launching his career. Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, called Yiannopoulos "brave" and said he was a "phenomenal individual" in November 2016. In February of this year, Trump himself tweeted a threat to revoke the University of California at Berkeley's federal funding because it canceled Yiannopoulos' appearance on campus. Yiannopoulos subsequently resigned from Breitbart during a furor over approving remarks he made in 2016 about pedophiliabut it appears that his career is still being funded by Robert Mercer, a right-wing billionaire whose daughter Rebekah served on Trump's transition team.

Alex Jones. Jones' site InfoWars advocates paranoid beliefs of all sorts, including but not limited to alt-right-adjacent theories about the "Jewish mafia" and "globalists," such as the Rothschilds, who manipulate world events to enrich themselves. Trump called Jones "amazing" during a 2015 interview, and the White House seemingly confirmed to the New York Times that Trump and Jones occasionally speak on the phone.

Sebastian Gorka. Ostensibly a counterterrorism adviser, Gorkas job appears to consist entirely of making grandiose and factually erroneous declarations during Fox News appearances, and he is reportedly a member of a far-right Hungarian group called Vitzi Rend that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. (He denies it.)

Julie Kirchner. Previously the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Kirchner was appointed to work at the federal Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services by the Trump administration in May. The Federation for American Immigration Reform's founder and its current president are both interested in eugenics and crank race science;both have complained that immigration undermines whites' dominance.

Social media outreach. Trump conducted an exclusive Q&A in July 2016 with a notorious Reddit forum called The_Donald. The first question he answered was submitted by Milo Yiannopoulos, and another user whose question he answered had previously referred to Black Lives Matter protests as "chimp outs." Other threads on The_Donald prior to Trump's Q&A had covered such subjects as "race mixing," Nazis' allegedly high IQs, and the "Jewish influence" in America. Top Trump aide Dan Scavino is essentially a White House liaison to internet extremists, while Donald Trump Jr. has retweeted prominent white supremacists and conducted an interview with a white-supremacist radio host who has said that interracial relationships constitute "white genocide." Trump Sr., for his part, famously retweeted a Twitter user named "WhiteGenocideTM" and posted an anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme image created by a Twitter user whose other work involved grotesque caricatures of black and Jewish individuals.

Saying and doing racist things constantly. During the 2016 campaign, Trump attacked a federal judge who had prosecuted drug traffickers in a previous job by calling him "Mexican" (he was born in Indiana) and suggesting that he was sympathetic to Mexican cartels; asserted that Mexican immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit rapes; defended the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII; retweeted a hoax graphic which wildly overstated the rates at which black Americans commit crimes against whites; claimed incorrectly that Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the world; suggested that bereaved miitary father Khizr Khan supports Islamic terrorism; reiterated his belief that the Central Park Five are guilty despite their having been legally exonerated; and approvingly repeated an apocryphal story about an American officer putting down an insurrection in the Phillippines by executing Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs' blood.

NBC News tracked down alleged Charlottesville killer James Fields Jr.'s mother on Sunday. She told the network that she hadn't known that her son was attending a white supremacist event. "I thought it had something to do with Trump," she said. Indeed.

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Donald Trump's ties to alt-right white supremacists are extensive. - Slate Magazine (blog)

MSNBC Goes Live To Tense Seattle Alt-Right Rally & Counter-Protests – Deadline

Images and footage from Seattle of riot-gear-equipped police standing between rallies of the white nationalist group Patriot Prayer and anti-fascist counter-protesters, carried live on MSNBC this afternoon, make clear the tensions that exploded in Charlottesville yesterday are carrying into the last stretch of the weekend.

A couple hours into the rallies, police have managed to keep the groups away from one another. A less eventful, more peaceful and smaller anti-Trump protest was being held in New Yorks midtown near Trump Tower.

The Portland-based, pro-Trump Patriot Prayer group had been planning its Seattle rally prior to yesterdays events and chose not to cancel. A counter-protest was organized by theGreater Seattle General Defense Committee, an anti-fascist group that posted a post-Charlottesville message on its website today: We may be entering a new stage of struggle. We are determined to meet the challenges ahead of us. We will beat back and defeat the fascists. We must defend each other. That means all of us.

Footage tweeted by a Seattle Times photographer (watch it below) showed the counter-protesters confronting a shielded line of police, chanting Let Us March and spraying the police with Silly String. The incident also was shown on MSNBC.

As of mid-afternoon Seattle time, neither CNN nor Fox News Channel had thrown live to Seattle.

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MSNBC Goes Live To Tense Seattle Alt-Right Rally & Counter-Protests - Deadline

Trump — once again — fails to condemn the alt-right, white supremacists – CNN

Instead, the man whose vicious attacks against Hillary Clinton, John McCain, federal judges, fellow Republican leaders and journalists helped define him both in and out of the White House simply blamed "many sides."

Trump stepped to the podium at his New Jersey golf resort and read a statement on the clashes, pinning the "egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. ... It has been going on for a long time in our country -- not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama," he said. "It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America."

"We should call evil by its name," tweeted Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate. "My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home."

"Very important for the nation to hear @POTUS describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists," tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, a competitor for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

"Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism," tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican.

Scott Jennings, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, said Trump's speech was not his "best effort," and faulted the President for "failure to acknowledge the racism, failure to acknowledge the white supremacy, failure to acknowledge the people who are marching around with Nazi flags on American soil."

In his decades of public life, Trump has never been one to hold back his thoughts, and that has continued in the White House, where in his seven months as President it has become clear that he views conflicts as primarily black-and-white.

Trump's Twitter account has become synonymous for blunt burns, regularly using someone's name when he feels they slighted him or let him down. Trump, in just the last week, has used his Twitter account to call out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by name, charge Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal with crying "like a baby" and needle media outlets by name.

His campaign was defined by his direct attacks. He pointedly attacked Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, for his speech at the Democratic National Committee that challenged his understanding of the Constitution, suggested federal Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel was unable to be impartial because of his Mexican heritage and said in a CNN interview that then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" after she questioned him at a debate.

Even before Trump was a presidential candidate, he was driven by a guiding principle imparted on him by Roy Cohn, his lawyer-turned-mentor: "If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard."

"What happens is they hit me and I hit them back harder," he told Fox News in 2016. "That's what we want to lead the country."

On Saturday at his Bedminster resort, Trump's bluntness gave way to vagueness as he failed to mention the impetus behind the violence that left at least one person dead in the streets of Charlottesville.

In doing so, Trump left it to anonymous White House officials to explain his remarks, leaving the door open to questions about his sincerity and why he won't talk about the racists at the heart of the protests.

"The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides," a White House official said. "There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today."

By being equivocal, Trump also failed to follow the same self-proclaimed rules he used to hammer other politicians.

Trump constantly slammed Obama and Clinton during his run for the presidency for failing to label terrorist attacks as such. He called out the two Democrats for failing to use the term "radical Islamic terrorism."

"These are radical Islamic terrorists and she won't even mention the word, and nor will President Obama," Trump said during an October 9 presidential debate. "Now, to solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name."

Trump declined to do just that on Saturday, as video of white nationalists flooded TV screens across the country hours after a smaller group marched through Charlottesville at night holding tiki torches and chanted, "You will not replace us."

Instead, Trump called for "a swift restoration of law and order" and said the federal government was "ready, willing and able" to provide "whatever other assistance is needed." He saluted law enforcement for their response and said he spoke with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, about the attack.

But the businessman-turned-president also touted his own economic achievements during his brief speech, mentioning employment numbers and recent companies that decided to relocate to the United States.

"We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me it is very, very sad," he said.

The reality for Trump is that his presidency helped white nationalists gain national attention, with groups drafting off his insurgent candidacy by tying themselves to the President and everything he stood for.

"I don't want to energize the group, and I disavow the group," Trump told a group of Times reporters and columnists during a meeting at the newspaper's headquarters in New York.

He added: "It's not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why."

But men like David Duke, possibly the most famous white nationalist, directly tied Saturday's protests to Trump.

"We are determined to take this country back. We're gonna fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke said in an interview with The Indianapolis Star on Saturday in Charlottesville. "That's why we voted for Donald Trump because he said he's going to take our country back."

When Trump tweeted earlier on Saturday that everyone "must be united & condemn all that hate stands for," Duke grew angry, feeling that the man who help bring white nationalist to this point was slamming them. He urged Trump -- via Twitter -- to "take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists."

Though earlier in the day Trump billed Saturday's event as a press conference, the President declined to respond to shouted question that would have allowed him to directly take on white nationalists.

"Mr. President, do you want the support of these white nationalist groups who say they support you, Mr. President? Have you denounced them strongly enough," one reporter shouted.

"A car plowing into people, would you call that terrorism sir?" another asked.

Trump walked out of the room.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny and Athena Jones contributed to this report.

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Trump -- once again -- fails to condemn the alt-right, white supremacists - CNN

Twitter Is Absolutely Roasting This Dumb Photo From The UVA Alt-Right March – Elite Daily

Welcome to 2017, where America is wondering whether we're going to see nuclear war and white nationalists are marching in Southern towns. On Friday night, a crowd of hundreds of white supremacists and far-right advocates with torches gathered at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia. But as mind-boggling and disturbing as it is that we're still dealing with issues of racism and white supremacy in 2017, there are some small rays of light: like just how ridiculous this photo from the alt-right rally at UVA on Aug. 11 is.

Demonstrators gathered at a local park and marched to the UVA campus, chanting phrases like, you will not replace us and blood and soil, according to The Guardian.

When they reached a group of counter-protesters centered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a fight ensued: the counter-protesters said they were attacked with torches, pepper spray, and lighter fluid. Photos of the event showed people suffering the effects of pepper spray, and one protester told The Guardian that the counter-protesters had been completely surrounded, with no means of escape.

But as horrifying as the situation is, there's one thing that's caught people's eye. And not for the intimidating, take-us-seriously way that the alt-right mob might have preferred.

This photo. Every single guy in this photo looks like they're super mad they just got rejected for the role of Pete Campbell on Mad Men. The number of polo shirts alone is overwhelming. And what's with the tiki torches, guys? Did you all meet up at Crate and Barrel beforehand to pick up supplies?

Twitter noticed.

How many of them do you think were actually citronella candles?

While many mocked the ridiculousness of a group that wants so badly to be taken seriously, for protesters on the ground the risk was real.

A video from counter-protester Emily Gorcenski, who The Guardian identified as one of those encircled, showed what it was like to be there. A live-streamed video shared to Twitter showed what appear to be alt-right marchers surrounding the counter-protesters and screaming slurs. In the final secondsof the 34-minute video, violence appears to break out.

A secondvideo, taken from another angle, showsmarchers closing around the counter-protesters, and torches being thrown. A chant of black lives matter is heard for a moment, before being drowned out.

On Saturday, white nationalistsare expected to gather for aUnite The Right rally to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, according to The New York Times. Authorities said that they were prepared for unrest and the Virginia National Guard is standing by.

Subscribe to Elite Daily's official newsletter, The Edge, for more stories you don't want to miss.

Lilli Petersen is the Night News Editor at Elite Daily. She previously covered News & Politics for Refinery29, and has also been published at The Mary Sue. She writes people and argues with things.

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Twitter Is Absolutely Roasting This Dumb Photo From The UVA Alt-Right March - Elite Daily

The Alt-Right’s Chickens Come Home to Roost – National Review

It is not the responsibility of the president of the United States to make specific statements every time a gang of KKK cretins marches up and down a town square. I fear that well never be rid of such people, and in normal times our political leaders are so far removed from hateful movements that no reasonable person could believe they had the slightest sympathy for that kind of vicious bigotry. But today was different, the alt-right movement is different, and this president is different.

Today, a person died. A car rammed into a crowd of left-wing protesters, sending bodies flying across the street. I wont embed the footage, but it looks horrible, and its hard to escape the conclusion that it was intentional. The car rammed the crowd at speed, backed up, and sped away. This horrific incident capped a day of street brawls after hundreds of alt-right activists, neo-Confederates, and outright Nazis marched together to express and defend their blood and soil white nationalism. It was a disgusting and reprehensible display.

It would be much easier to write off this small band of racists if they werent also part of a larger alt-right movement that was responsible for an unprecedented wave of online threats, intimidation, and harassment throughout the 2016 campaign season. Journalists, writers (including me and my family), and ordinary citizens were targeted with obscene and threatening images, racist messages, doxing, and sometimes promises of physical violence all for the sin of criticizing Trump.

Violence then started to spill into the real world. A man wielding a sword hunted and killed a black man in New York City. A member of an alt-Reich Nation Facebook group killed another black man in Maryland. A man opened fire on two immigrants at a bar in Kansas, killing one. A white supremacist in Portland murdered two men on a train who intervened when he harassed a Muslim and her black friend. And thats not an exclusive list. Meanwhile, the online hate campaigns roll on.

Incredibly, key elements of the Trump coalition, including Trump himself, gave the alt-right aid and comfort. Steve Bannon, the presidents chief strategist, proclaimed that his publication, Breitbart.com, was the the platform for the alt-right, Breitbart long protected, promoted, and published Milo Yiannopolous the alt-rights foremost respectable defender and Trump himself retweeted alt-right accounts and launched into an explicitly racial attack against an American judge of Mexican descent, an attack that delighted his most racist supporters.

In other words, if there ever was a time in recent American political history for an American president to make a clear, unequivocal statement against the alt-right, it was today. Instead, we got a vague condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. This is unacceptable, especially given that Trump can be quite specific when hes truly angry. Just ask the Khan family, Judge Curiel, James Comey, or any other person he considers a personal enemy. Even worse, members of the alt-right openly celebrated Trumps statement, taking it as a not-so-veiled decision to stand against media calls to condemn their movement.

America is at a dangerous crossroads. I know full well that I could have supplemented my list of violent white supremacist acts with a list of vicious killings and riots from left-wing extremists including the recent act of lone-wolf progressive terror directed at GOP members of the House and Senate. There is a bloodlust at the political extremes. Now is the time for moral clarity, specific condemnations of vile American movements no matter how many MAGA hats its members wear and for actions that back up those appropriately strong words.

As things stand today, we face a darkening political future, potentially greater loss of life, and a degree of polarization that makes 2016 look like a time of national unity. Presidents arent all-powerful, but they can either help or hurt. Today, Trumps words hurt the nation he leads.

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The Alt-Right's Chickens Come Home to Roost - National Review