Trump and the alt-right

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Donald Trump sent shock waves through the political world with his broad defense of participants in a white supremacist rally last weekend, praising them for obtaining a permit and describing some as “very fine people.” He previously put Nazis, the KKK and white nationalists on the same moral plane as those who showed up to protest them, casting blame on “many sides.” Some have been repelled by Trump’s conduct. Two White House business councils disbanded as some of the nation’s top CEO found any association with Trump too toxic to maintain.

Scores of charities have canceled scheduled events at Trump’s private club, Mar-a-lago. A small but growing group of Republican members of Congress have criticized Trump directly. At the same time, powerful forces on the right are now lining up behind Trump, validating and extending Trump’s views. Among them is Rush Limbaugh, the powerful right-wing radio host who boasts a weekly audience of 26 million people. Yesterday, Limbaugh delivered a full-throated and frightening defense of Trump, dismissing white supremacy as a problem and warning listeners that “we are on the cusp of a second civil war.” Limbaugh’s comments were laced with anti-Semetic tropes, blaming the violence in Charlottesville on “people like George Soros and any other number of international financiers whose objective it is to take the United States out and down as a superpower.”

Rush Limbaugh says white supremacists and the KKK ‘are not the problem,’ warns of second civil war – ThinkProgress

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Amazing, not to say depressing..

Fully 77% of Trump voters think the president "did enough" to condemn white nationalist violence in Charlottesville. Two-thirds of them had no problem with the president's delay in mentioning neo-Nazis and white supremacists by name. Perhaps most remarkably, 48% of Trump voters think the Charlottesville white nationalists either "have a point" (37%) or were "mostly right" (11%). And 68% of Trump voters see "a lot of discrimination" against white people in the US.

A White House meltdown in the making - BBC News

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“Buy American presumes an imagined economic nation that pits working people in the United States against those of other countries, casting them as the enemy,” writes historian Dana Frank. “From there, it’s often been a quick step to racial distinctions and attacks.”

Trump’s trade agenda is no different. It is explicitly modeled on protecting American jobs from foreign aggressors. He’s attacked trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership as creating “carnage” and economic suffering on our shores, allowing other countries to “rip us off.” He says he’ll renegotiate these deals while also promising to levy huge tariffs on imports from countries like China and Mexico, nations that he argues have undermined American jobs.

Trump’s White Supremacist Economic Agenda | New Republic

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Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist, says observers shouldn't believe claims by Spencer or others belonging to similar movements that they aren't racist. He described the alt-right and white nationalist movements as the culmination of a 30-year effort to "massage" the white supremacist message. Picciolini would know — at the age of 14, he was recruited by Clark Martell, then the leader of the Chicago Area Skin Heads, reputed to be the first organized neo-Nazi group in the US. Two years later, in 1989, Picciolini became the leader of the group.

There's no real difference between 'white nationalism' and 'alt-right' - Business Insider

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Alt-right, or there is another word for that..

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up... Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified. Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a “concentration camp,” where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump ... pardoned him. ...

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style. ...

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Fascism, American Style

For more Arpaio antics, see here.

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The jail, relentless police raids and stops of people who looked Hispanic, and the tirade of contempt and racial stereotypes that spewed out of Arpaio’s mouth when I interviewed him, were all designed to make life as difficult as possible for the migrant communities of Arizona.

But the circus of cruelty was only the pretext for a bigger signal. Arpaio’s actions, over 20 years as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, were designed to prove that the American far-right can defy the constitution and the federal government with impunity. That is what President Trump really sanctioned when he pardoned Arpaio last week: open defiance of the law.

Joe Arpaio’s prison was a circus of cruelty. Now his values are spreading | Opinion | The Guardian

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Soo, Trump soured on Cohn because... he's too tough on Nazi's!

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn is Donald Trump’s top economic policy aide. He was also, until recently, widely regarded as a leading candidate to succeed Janet Yellen at the helm of the Federal Reserve when her term expires next year. But a report from Michael C. Bender, Harriet Torry, and Nick Timiraos at the Wall Street Journal says that’s now “unlikely”.

Trump, it seems, soured on Cohn when Cohn told the Financial Times on August 25 that the Trump administration “can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning” neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Cohn, who is still the administration’s point person on the development of a tax reform plan, is apparently in the doghouse.

Reasonable people can disagree about exactly how much independence it’s realistic to expect. But “is willing to defend the president’s defenses of neo-Nazis” is an extraordinarily high bar for obsequiousness — virtually everyone under the sun criticized Trump on this score. It’s hard to imagine anyone that lacking in concern for their reputation, public standing, or self-respect being able to appropriately balance the national interest against the president’s whims.

Trump is souring on his top economic aide for the worst possible reason - Vox

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Richard Spencer, a noted white nationalist and supporter of President Donald Trump, is one of many frequent guests at the new Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., according to a New York Times report published Friday. Spencer was spotted at the hotel in early August, the Times reported, along with Evan McClaren, who works at Spencer's white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute. McClaren declined to answer Times' reporter Katie Rogers' request for comment at the time about his visit to the hotel because he said he was "too busy planning a rally" in Charlottesville, Virginia. That rally, where white nationalists clashed with counter-protesters, left one dead at the hands of an apparent white supremacist.

Richard Spencer stayed at Trump hotel to plan Charlottesville rally - Business Insider

“How do I tell an African-American friend or a Hispanic friend why the Republican Party is better for them than the Democratic Party?” Heye asked. “I can talk about any policy that I think might help them, but they will just come back and say that the party does not care about me.”

GOP fears damage to brand from Charlottesville | TheHill

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All it takes to reduce support for housing assistance among Donald Trump supporters is exposure to an image of a black man. That’s the takeaway from a new study by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, set to be published in Research & Politics. In a randomized survey experiment, the trio of researchers exposed respondents to images of either a white or black man. They found that when exposed to the image of a black man, white Trump supporters were less likely to back a federal mortgage aid program. Favorability toward Trump was a key measure for how strong this effect was.

The study is just the latest to show that racial attitudes are a powerful predictor for support for Trump — and the newest to suggest that such attitudes play a major role in Americans’ views toward public policy. Previous studies have found that racial resentment was a much stronger indicator of support for Trump than views about the economy. And other research has shown that priming people to think about race can make them more conservative on a host of issues.

Study: Trump fans are much angrier about housing assistance when they see an image of a black man - Vox

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This is already bad enough:

Trump's early-morning retweets included three videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the ultranationalist far-right group Britain First who has previously been charged with "religious aggravated harassment" in the UK, The New York Times reported. The videos included footage portraying Muslims committing violent acts. Fransen tweeted alongside the first video, "Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" Another was titled "Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary." A third was titled "Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death." Authorities later found that the man shown assaulting the Dutch person was neither Muslim nor a migrant, The Mirror reported, citing two Dutch websites. Britain First often peddles anti-Muslim conspiracy theories..

White House: It doesn't matter if anti-Muslim videos Trump retweeted are real - Business Insider

But according to his press secretary it doesn't matter whether the video's are real..

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said it didn't matter whether the anti-Muslim videos President Donald Trump retweeted on Wednesday morning were real. "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," Sanders told reporters Wednesday, according to a CBS News reporter. "His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security."

White House: It doesn't matter if anti-Muslim videos Trump retweeted are real - Business Insider

Are these guys for real?

So they put up phoney videos dramatizing a threat that is several orders of magnitude smaller than the domestic gun threat, which kills 5000-10000 times more people. Yea right.