Updated: Jan. 20, 2017
aNewDomain — Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump alarmed plenty of people by refusing Jake Tapper’s invitation to “unequivocally condemn” former Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke and his endorsement of Trump for president. Trump finally got around to it but the whole exchange lingers uncomfortably.
Trump’s comments, plus his echoing of white supremacist sentiments and the retweeting of their accounts has fired up hate groups big time, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
White supremacists seem to heartily agree. As one host of the podcast on Radio Aryan put it, Trump’s campaign has “opened up political space for nationalists” and “made it easier for people in both the US and Europe to say things that were previously impossible to say in public discourse” and, even, “made recruiting easier.”
Here are some of the scariest and most bizarre things you’ll find on hate group discussion boards about Trump now.
Comparing Trump to Hitler isn’t just the purview of commentators in the mainstream media. The alarming image above, posted on the discussion boards of white supremacist site Stormfront reflect a common sentiment we found: That Trump is more than a furious reality star presidential candidate trying to nab a four-year term as US president.
Rather, he’s the “New Fuhrer,” here to usher in the so-called “Fourth Reich,” arriving just in time to clear the US of Jews, Hispanics and other minorities.
In the chilling words of one poster, “maybe this time the Holocaust will actually come to pass, and this time we can get on with our lives without having the eternal parasite sucking our blood.”
On a (comparably) lighter side, pop star Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is “simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world,” according to one blogger repeating a meme that’s all over the hate sites this week.
The meme started as a teen’s joke last summer, but now white supremacists have added weird new wrinkles to it. For instance, writes one poster, that when Swift finds it safe to reveal her true identity she “probably will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and (the two) will be crowned American royalty.”
For more on this meme and Swift’s befuddled reaction to it, check out this article over at Vice.
Google the term “God-Emperor Trump” and you’ll be plenty bothered. We found dozens of postings on various hate group sites online that not only refer to Trump with that crazy title, but plenty that also lovingly refer to the “Princess Ivanka.”
“Hail, Emperor Trump! And hail, victory!” writes one poster, enthusiastically announcing his belief that Trump “has arrived” to save them all from the dreaded “white genocide,” that caucasian European Americans are on the bring of destruction.
The SPLC, the Anti Defamation League and other anti-hate watchdog groups point out that Trump largely has brought this adoration on himself. Case in point: when Trump retweeted and responded to a Twitter account by the same name. “After Trump tweeted two “white genocide” messages,” says the SPLC, “the average number of Google searches for “white genocide” nearly doubled, climbing from 9,900 in December to 18,100 in January.” What concerned the SPLC delighted some posters at the Stormfront hate site.
“Trump is giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote a writer at the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist site. “What are the odds that (w)hite genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate.
“There is no way that this could be anything other than both a wink-wink-wink and a call for more publicity on his campaign,” continued the post. “The media is going to say “Trump doubles down on (w)hite genocide” and he will just not respond to request for comment, and if it gets brought up in an interview (Trump) will just say ‘you know, we retweet a lot of people, a lot of people feel strongly about my campaign and want to make America great again, everybody likes me.’ Today in America the air is cold … and it tastes like victory.”
On another site: “[T]his is a GOOD thing. [Trump] willingly retweeted the (white genocide) name. The name was chosen to raise awareness of our plight. Helped propagate it. We should be grateful.”
And another: “A resounding applause to you, Herr Trump. And please pay no mind to the anti-White idiots insulting you.” Find more about this incident over here at the SPLC page.
When Trump comes to power, believe some posters on hate group sites, he will arrest all the members of the Obama administration up to and including US president Barack Obama for “creating Isis.” Yes, that is what some posters on hate group discussion groups claim to actually believe.
Even if Trump didn’t come to power, well that would be okay, too. According to the writer of one article we found that was titled “The Donald Trump revolution.” At the very least, he wrote, Trump “is laying the groundwork for the “great leader” who will usher in the ‘great white revolution.’
The New American Civil War, exults another, “has finally come to America!”
There’s no question that Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Mexicans and Muslims, specifically, has excited white supremacist groups, even if their leaders aren’t convinced that Trump really is one of them.
After all, Trump has no known ties to hate groups, he’s fired staffers for posting racist comments on social media and, when a man displayed a Confederate flag at a Virginia rally, he was ejected. Yet the haters have no hate for him, and it’s easy to see why.
The white supremacist Don Black, who founded Stormfront, told Politico earlier this year that his site has been seeing a measurable uptick. “Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” Black said, adding that the lasting effect of Trump will be that he “so energized the white nationalist movement.”
“He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him,” Black said.
If you have a complaint or a tip about hate speech you see online or anywhere else, contact the SPLC on its tip page here. To report racist and other hate speech you see on social networking sites, head here. In the case of anti-Semitic hate crimes and speech, the ADL takes reports here.
For aNewDomain, I’m Gina Smith.
Credits: Cover image via SharedWanderlust.com, All Rights Reserved. Other images: hailtothegynocracy.wordpress.com, All Rights Reserved; politicsandwar.com, All Rights Reserved, Vice.com, All Rights Reserved.
