Republican Candidates Openly Embracing White Supremacy

Trump rally protest DSC 4415 (36703239316) (cropped)

Republican candidates are either a card-carrying Nazi, a Holocaust denier, a proud white supremacist, or all of the above in 5 races this year.

Vox News reported earlier this year that “Self-described Nazis and white supremacists are running as Republicans across the country.”

Continuing, Vox reported that:

In at least five state and national races across the country, the Republican Party is dealing with an uncomfortable problem. Their party’s candidates are either a card-carrying Nazi, a Holocaust denier, a proud white supremacist, or all of the above.

The Atlantic reported in August that:

The most enduring scandal in and around the White House might not be corruption, but rather the administration’s constant embrace of bigotry from white-supremacist and far-right groups.

[W]hat is clear is that the Trump administration and its wing of the Republican Party are the chief launderers of white-supremacist and white-nationalist ideas in America today. Even with multiple investigations into Trumpworld currently under way, it’s worth considering whether the real lasting scandal from this administration—one that will truly shape and corrupt democracy for decades to come—might just be the elevation of plain old racism.

Continuing, The Atlantic reported that:

Trump is easily impressed by lies and falsehoods that appear to support the agenda of his mostly white base, and the backlash that he has received for repeatedly spreading misinformation from hucksters, hoaxers, and hate groups hasn’t seemed to phase him…. He’s repeatedly shared tweets from garden-variety racists and bigots, and he once retweeted an actual Twitter account with the name “White Genocide.” Each time, the president has either done nothing or deleted the tweet with little explanation and no apology.

The Atlantic concluded their report with the following grim observation:

[I]n reality, the pipeline that Trump and his allies have built between hate groups and the mainstream isn’t accidental, unwitting, or merely the product of being repeatedly taken in by grifters. This is what was always promised with the refrain of “Make America Great Again,” a dog whistle that many minorities were once ridiculed for properly hearing…

When all else fails, when associates become witnesses and the political clouds darken, Trump is always aware that the live wire at the core of Trumpism—the energies he first wielded when demanding Obama’s birth certificate—will always be there. There’s a hard base of white support that he can always activate by selling the fear that white power will be usurped. Unfortunately for those who might be purged, interned, deported, disenfranchised, or disappeared should those fears be allowed to reign, many Americans are still buying into them, and will continue to do so.

Vox concluded their report, noting that “racist rhetoric” has not historically served Republicans well electorally:

In Virginia’s 2017 governor’s race, for example, Republican Ed Gillespie rode hard on NFL protests and keeping Confederate statues in place — and lost, as Democratic and independent voters were motivated to turn out in part by Gillespie’s strategy.

Not to mention that racism is inherently anathema to minority votes. A critical rise in black turnout in Alabama’s Senate special election helped push Democrat Doug Jones over controversial Republican Roy Moore. One activist told the Atlantic that black voters were responding to “the resurgence of this white conservative overtly racist rhetoric.” Bad Republican candidates also depress Republican voting. In that Alabama election, thousands of voters — including many who supported Donald Trump in 2016 — simply didn’t show up.

More important, candidates like Walker and Jones threaten to further inculcate the idea that the Republican Party is inherently susceptible to candidates who espouse racist and anti-Semitic ideas. The Republican Party is, after all, both the party of Lincoln, and the party of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater’s Southern strategy aimed at getting racists on board without, in Atwater’s own words, “saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’”

Samuel Warde
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