On Friday, September 9, a group of white supremacists got together to hold an event showcasing their love for white people and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
A Trifecta of Racist Hate
Friday’s event, initially booked at the National Press Club but then cancelled for security reasons, turned into a cloak-and-dagger type event. According to Mother Jones:
“Reporters covering the event were instructed to go to the entrance of the Old Ebbitt Grill, near the White House. There, they would encounter a man in a charcoal suit and brown tie who would reveal the new location of the conference.”
The new location turned out to be the Peacock Lounge at the Willard Hotel. And, of course, the Republican nut jobs were waiting there to welcome the press.
The three hatemongers scheduled to speak at the event? Richard Spencer, Peter Brimelow, and Jared Taylor.
Richard Spencer is the leader of the National Policy Institute – a white supremacist organization founded in 2005. The NPI was the group that put together the event. Spencer is also someone who regularly posts vulgar, racist, and misogynistic tweets, as well as someone who has no problem retweeting people with swastikas in their handle.
The Southern Policy Law Center describes Spencer as someone who:
“ … Advocates for an Aryan homeland for the supposedly dispossessed white race and calls for ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ to halt the ‘deconstruction’ of European culture.”
Peter Brimelow is the founder of VDARE.com, and both he and his website appear in the files of the Southern Poverty Law Center. As described by the SPLC:
“Peter Brimelow, a leading anti-immigration activist and author of the bestselling anti-immigrant tome Alien Nation, is the president of the VDARE Foundation, a nonprofit that warns against the polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics, and Spanish-speaking immigrants.
He is also the most prominent contributor to the foundation’s VDARE.com, an immigrant-bashing hate site that regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right.”
Jared Taylor, the third speaker at the event, is another white supremacist with a long history. His page at the SPLC says:
“He is the founder of the New Century Foundation and edited its now discontinued American Renaissance magazine, which, despite its pseudo-academic polish, regularly publishes proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. The magazine was replaced by a lively website, Amren.com. Taylor also hosts a conference every year (it was formerly biannual) where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”
So make no mistake about the alt-right. These are hateful, vile racists to their core.
Their Racist Ideals Are Why They Love Trump
As Pema Levy wrote for Mother Jones:
“Spencer’s ideas about race are intertwined with his support for Trump.”
These guys love the Republican nominee’s anti-immigration stance and his manner most of all:
“’I don’t think our support of Trump is really about policy at the end of the day,” Spencer said. ‘I think it’s really about Trump’s style, the fact that he doesn’t back down, the fact that he’s willing to confront his enemies…You look at that and you think, “This is what a leader looks like.”
Spencer continued, ‘It really is about him and it’s about, in a way, projecting onto him our hopes and dreams. There’s something called “me magic,” and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy…We want to make Trump; we want to imagine him in our image. And that is maybe—you can see that in a meme of Trump as a Napoleon or Trump as some figure out of the Dune novels in an arcade of the future in a robotic suit of armor fighting enemies. All of that stuff is silly, all of that stuff is ridiculous, but it actually gets at something real and that is that we want something more, we want something heroic, we want something that is not defined by liberalism or individual rights or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic.’
For this description, Spencer was greeted with much applause by his fans in the room. He elaborated that rather than a multicultural America, his ideal is a white empire. He described his ‘dream…ethno-state’ as ‘a homeland for all Europeans,’ which would take an ‘imperial form.’”
For anyone who believes in equity and justice, those are some seriously frightening words, folks.
Racists – Supporting Trump Since Beginning
Of course, this is only the most recent expression of support from racists (at least of this writing … that I know of …). Support from racist groups has been one of the hallmarks of Trump’s campaign from the very start. The alt-right, however, is something that has largely been on the fringe.
Until now.
Trump’s new campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon, came to Trump directly from Breitbart News. Bannon HIMSELF said of Breitbart:
“We’re the platform for the alt-right.”
Make NO mistake, here. The alt-right is not just another group pushing “conservative” ideals. They are straight up neo-Nazis. And a major cheerleader of theirs is the CEO of the Trump campaign. We cannot make the mistake of thinking of the “alt-right” as a mainstream group. Though their ideals may indeed be representative of the Republican party now, they are not representative of America as a whole.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton blasted the alt-right in her speech on August 25. Many Americans were unfamiliar with the term before that speech. Too many are still unfamiliar with it. I want everyone to know what this movement is, if only so we can fight against it together.
If you can stomach it, Richard Spencer broadcast some of the event on Periscope. You can see it here:
LIVE on #Periscope https://t.co/2p2tND4Y1c
— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) September 9, 2016
Featured Image by Alexander Tolley via Flickr under CC BY-ND 2.0 license
