Category: racism

Trump Boosts Promotional Video Which Borrows White Nationalist Logo (UPDATED)

UPDATED: Mediaite posted an op-ed from an anonymous meme-maker who claims the logo is innocent. While I think it is good of Mediaite to provide a forum for a possible explanation, I don’t know enough about “Carpe Donktum” to evaluate his/her claims. I also need to add that I originally thought the ad came from the Trump campaign. However, it was produced by a supporter of Trump and retweeted by the president. I have corrected my post to reflect that.

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Somebody supporting the Trump re-election effort is too familiar with white nationalist symbols. Recently, Trump retweeted a video that ended with a lion logo surrounded by red, white, and blue which has been promoted by a white nationalist group. Watch:


As first reported by Mediaite this morning, Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski found a tweet from white nativist group VDARE using the logo in 2016 and showed it next to the final shot of the Trump/Pence video.

Note the 2016 date. The logo is the same as the one used in the Trump/Pence ad just this week.

The Lion’s Guard

The logo is also associated with a group called “The Lion’s Guard.” This group (which was promoted and praised on white supremacist site Daily Stormer in 2016) aims to provide security at Trump rallies and was removed from Twitter for awhile. They are back now with the same logo.

Note the slogan on the group’s website:

Better to be a lion for a day, than a lamb for eternity.

The slogan is a simpler version of a quote attributed to Mussolini:

It’s better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.

In 2016, Trump retweeted this quote knowing the attribution was to Mussolini:

Donald Trump and/or his social media team thought it would be a good idea to promote a symbol which communicated nativist themes. They who have eyes to see, let them see.

 

 

 

Who Agrees with Tucker Carlson About White Nationalism?

To me, it seems obvious that white nationalism is a problem in America. However, Tucker Carlson famously said it isn’t. Even after Charlottesville, the church shooting in South Carolina, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the El Paso massacre, Carlson said it ranks low on America’s problems.

I wondered who agrees with him and found, as many people quickly pointed out, that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke cheered Carlson on.

This is not good company.

Who else?

C-Fam’s Austin Ruse

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway

The Federalist

Talk Show Host Vicki McKenna

Kellyanne Conway defended Carlson. “But what about Antifa?”

The Stream’s John Zmirak and Eric Metaxas

John Zmirak is a Senior Editor at The Stream, a Christian online publication conceptualized by James Robison. I responded to this tweet:

And then Zmirak replied:

After that tweet, Zmirak blocked me. Eric Metaxas retweeted Zmirak’s original tweet.

League of the South is Ready for Battle

This weekend the League of the South is having their annual convention in Florida. According to the League, they are ready for war. The League was one of the groups who did battle at Charlottesville. The League’s leader Michael Hill, wrote this in 2014:

But what about that liberal canard that says that no matter how well armed the citizens are, they will never be able to defeat the modern military in a toe-to-toe confrontation? First, that presumes that the US military would fire on its own people, a question whose answer we do not know. And, second, it presumes that the fight would be a conventional one. More likely, it will be Fourth Generation Warfare, which is just another way of saying guerrilla war.

In 4Gen Warfare the lines between the military and the political, economic, cultural, and social are blurred past the point of recognition. To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.

4Gen Warfare doesn’t require that the populace be armed equal to the military and law enforcement. In fact, having such firepower, with few exceptions (such as full-auto “assault weapons,” silencers, and a handful of other esoteric toys), would be a logistical and tactical burden to the common 3- to 5-man group so common in this type of warfare.

Make no mistake about it, the League and groups like it engage in rhetoric unlike any Scientologist or evolutionist. They are dangerous with enough numbers to create terror and motivate criminal activity.

According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, white supremacist groups account for a significant number of criminal investigations. Watch:

While white supremacist* motivated crime isn’t the greatest threat, it isn’t trivial and one should question the motives of anyone who minimizes it.

Additional information: See this report on domestic terrorism 2018. Yes, the numbers are small but the potential damage is great and the threat appears to be growing.

 

*white supremacy and white nationalism have been distinguished by some as the difference between attitude and political objective. Supremacy is an attitude that whites are better than other races; nationalism is a political objective of make America a majority white country or favoring segregation. It is hard for me to make much of a distinction in attitude. To me, it seems to be a rationalization of racial prejudice to claim white nationalist political goals while claiming to have no bias toward people of color. For the purpose of this post, I am considering the terms synonyms.

Fox News Pundit Tucker Carlson Says White Nationalism is a Hoax and Not a Problem

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Fox News pundit with the ear of the president Tucker Carlson told his audience that white supremacy isn’t a problem. Watch:

Carlson said in his rant said, “the combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.” This is supposed to comfort his audience by suggesting that groups with small memberships can’t be a problem.

Small But Deadly

I counter by noting the membership of the group behind the 9-11 bombings was never large, numbering in the thousands according to this report.  According to a Center for Strategic Studies report, the core membership in al-Qaeda is currently fewer than 1,000. However, the report suggests that al-Qaeda is in a resurgence and continues to be a threat around the world. The movement is decentralized and numerically small but nonetheless remains a threat to our security.

Small groups can coordinate efforts and create terroristic threats as the Unite the Right rally showed in Charlottesville. This lawsuit filed against various white supremacists outlines actions taken by small groups of white supremacists to plan violence. One of the defendants in this suit is accused of using the web to plan violence at Charlottesville. The suit alleged that:

Daily Stormer established “meet ups” and chat rooms that coconspirators and attendees used throughout the August 11 and 12 weekend to coordinate their violence. The Daily Stormer released its own poster promoting the “rally” that read, “UNITE THE RIGHT/ Join Azzmador and the Daily Stormer to end Jewish influence in America,” accompanied by a Nazi-like figure wielding a hammer, ready to smash a Jewish star. For months before the Unite the Right events on August 11 and 12, Anglin organized his followers to attend and prepared them to commit racially motivated violent acts in Charlottesville. Although Anglin did not attend the rally himself because he is currently in hiding in order to evade service in connection with a separate lawsuit relating to events in Whitefish, Montana, Anglin orchestrated the movements of Daily Stormer followers and incited them to violence on a live feed contemporaneously with the events as they occurred on August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville.

The point is large numbers are not necessary for great harm to occur. Surely Tucker Carlson knows this.

In fact, the parallel to global terror groups should stimulate greater efforts to monitor and intervene in these domestic terror networks. Far from a hoax, white nationalist groups are emboldened in recent years. I have been following these groups for about a decade and I think they are as potent as I have seen them.

Daniel Dale and FBI Director Wray brings the facts on why white supremacy is a problem.

The Charlottesville Rally Wasn’t about Robert E. Lee as a General

President Trump doubled down on his claim that very fine people were in Charlottesville to show support for the statue of Robert E. Lee. When asked about that comment, he said he answered that question “perfectly.” Then he discussed his view of why some of the people were there. Watch:

A review of Trump’s comments from the Charlottesville news conference shows that he condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists in one breath but in other comments he suggests that there was some other group of Lee statue supporting people who gathered with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In this theory, these “very fine people” were there only to support the statue which isn’t a bad thing in his mind. I maintain it is entirely right and proper to question the wisdom and character of anyone showing up to a rally convened by neo-Nazis and and white supremacists. If neo-Nazis show up in my town and rally against drunk driving, I am not going to carry a sign in that march even though I oppose drunk driving.

In my view, it is not noble to support the myth of Lee as a great statesman and General. However, I do know that some people do think that and do so sincerely. Their desire to uphold the Lost Cause blinds them to a complete picture of Lee. What makes me think Lee worship is a smokescreen is that the activities of the weekend were not about Lee. When the tiki torch marchers gathered around Lee’s statue, they didn’t sing tributes to Lee or chant “General Lee is my favorite General.” They chanted, “You will not replace us.” Watch:

The “us” in this chant referred to white people not members of the “Lee is my favorite General” club.

Those people weren’t there because of their love of military history. If they were there for Lee at all, it was because he represents white supremacy. What is very fine about that?

Giving cover to Trump’s distraction, people like Dinesh D’Souza and Matt Walsh want to make Charlottesville about Robert E. Lee as a General. It wasn’t.

 

Image: By Cville dog – Own work, Public Domain

Jackie Robinson Day

April 15 marks the day in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball. The executive who signed him with the express purpose of combating racism was Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I share a hometown with Branch Rickey — Portsmouth, Ohio — and was always reminded of his legacy because I played high school baseball in Branch Rickey Park (pictured below).

To me, Branch Rickey’s role in this story is sweet irony. White supremacy was strong in my hometown. For most of my life there, African-Americans were segregated into neighborhoods surrounding a large public housing project. There was strong prejudice and discrimination, even among Christians. And yet, Branch Rickey left that small town to make history in the big city in a way that changed attitudes about race forever.

A 2011 CNN article on Rickey explains the role of faith in his decision (read the entire transcript here) but I will close with this paragraph:

When a well-known journalist of the era told the Dodgers general manager that he thought “all hell would break loose” the next day with Robinson due to take the field for the first time as a Brooklyn Dodger, Rickey disagreed. “My grandfather immediately responded to him, ‘I believe tomorrow all heaven will rejoice,’” the younger Rickey said.