Bill Berkowitz / The Smirking Chimp & Sarah Posner and David Neiwert / Mother Jones Magazine – 2016-11-07 22:39:01
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bill-berkowitz/69701/trump-s-paramilitary-followers-gearing-up-to-make-america-white-again
Trump’s Paramilitary Followers
Gearing Up To Make America White Again
Bill Berkowitz / The Smirking Chimp
(November 5, 2016) — “Make America Great Again” is the slogan that Donald Trump has been campaigning on since he announced his candidacy for the presidency. As the election quickly approaches, “Make America White Again,” might be a more apt tagline.
Should Hillary Clinton win the election, Trump’s congressional colleagues are pledging to launch investigations, threatening impeachment, and, vowing to not approve any Clinton Supreme Court nominees. Even more troubling is that while Trump has been trumpeting a “rigged election,” rightwing paramilitary groups are preparing for civil war.
Reuters’ Justin Mitchell and Andy Sullivan recently reported, “members of the Three Percent Security Force” are mobilizing “for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton.” While militia members say, “they won’t fire the first shot, but they’re not planning to leave their guns at home, either.”
The Trump campaign has captured the imaginations of militia groups, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Sovereign Citizens, neo-Nazis, and an assortment of anti-immigration activists, white supremacists, and white nationalists.
As David Neiwert and Sarah Posner pointed out in their extraordinarily thorough investigative report titled “How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream,” “Trump fever quickly spread [as] extremists new to presidential politics openly endorsed Trump, including Don Black, a former grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the neo-Nazi site Stormfront; Rocky Suhayda, chair of the American Nazi Party; and Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, the successor to David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Spencer, an emerging leader among a new generation of white nationalists known as the ‘alt right,’ declared that Trump ‘loves white people.'”
Niewert and Posner’s report, sponsored by Mother Jones and the Investigative Fund, pointed out that, “Extremists’ zeal for Trump only grew with . . . [the] hir[ing] of . . . Stephen Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart News and a big booster himself of far-right rhetoric [as campaign chief].
Trump’s enduring campaign tactics — from calls for black protesters to be ‘roughed up’ to the circulation of racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic language and memes—is proof for them that white nationalism has not only arrived, but has found a champion in a major-party nominee for president of the United States.”
Reuters’ Mitchell and Sullivan noted that “Armed paramilitary groups first gained prominence in the early 1990s, fueled by confrontations in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, culminating in a militia sympathizer’s 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
“Their numbers dwindled following that attack but have spiked in recent years, driven by fears that President Barack Obama will threaten gun ownership and erode the power of local government. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, estimates there were 276 active militias last year, up from 42 in 2008.”
In 2014, a nationwide survey of law enforcement officials trained in intelligence gathering or counterterrorism by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), found that members of the Sovereign Citizens movement were considered a major internal terrorist threat.
The recent acquittal of seven armed occupiers after taking over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon may presage the opening up a floodgate of such actions. According to Reuters, “Federal officials fear more clashes could come.”
Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Reuters that “Prior to this campaign season, these ideas were relegated to sort of the political fringe of the American political landscape. Now these ideas are legitimized.”
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His Conservative Watch columns document the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
US Militia Forces Ready for Martial Law!
Jose Travieso Disciple of Yeshua (42 minutes)
(September 26, 2016) – “Are you Ready?? Are you saved by the blood of the Lamb? Have you repented and given your heart and your life to Jesus Christ to save you from all the wickedness. There is not much time left, the world is becoming more and more chaotic each day and the Beast system is ready to go with the pope in place for mandatory worship of the beast. Seek God and his righteousness and everything else will be added unto you!!”
How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream
The full story of his connection with far-right extremists
Sarah Posner and David Neiwert / Mother Jones Magazine
(October14, 2016) — The first warning sign that something new was brewing came in June 2015, as Donald Trump joined the crowded field vying for the Republican presidential nomination. In the extravagant lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, he announced he would build a wall to keep out Mexican criminals and “rapists.”
“I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President,” wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, 12 days later. Anglin, a 32-year-old skinhead who wears an Aryan “Black Sun” tattoo on his chest and riffs about the inferior “biological nature” of black people, hailed Trump as “the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters.”
This neo-Nazi seal of approval initially seemed like an aberration. But two months later, when Trump released his immigration policy, far-right extremists saw a clear signal that Trump understood their core anger and fear about America being taken over by minorities and foreigners.
Trump’s plan to deport masses of undocumented immigrants and end birthright citizenship was radical and thrilling — “a revolution,” in the words of influential white nationalist author Kevin MacDonald, “to restore a White America.”
Trump’s move was a “game changer,” said MacDonald, a 70-year-old silver-haired former academic who edits the Occidental Observer, which the Anti-Defamation League calls “online anti-Semitism’s new voice.” Trump, he wrote, “is saying what White Americans have been actually thinking for a very long time.”
“Stunning,” raved Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant site VDare.com. “The thing that delighted us the most,” he wrote, was Trump’s plan to close “the ‘Anchor Baby’ loophole,” denying citizenship to the American-born children of immigrants — a policy that Brimelow said he had been advocating for more than a decade.
Trump “may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people,” remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a white nationalist website called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank dedicated to “scientifically” proving white superiority.
Taylor told us that Trump was the first presidential candidate from a major party ever to earn his support because Trump “is talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites. That is something that is very important to me and to all racially conscious white people.”
Trump fever quickly spread: Other extremists new to presidential politics openly endorsed Trump, including Don Black, a former grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the neo-Nazi site Stormfront; Rocky Suhayda, chair of the American Nazi Party; and Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, the successor to David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Spencer, an emerging leader among a new generation of white nationalists known as the “alt right,” declared that Trump “loves white people.” . . . .
Read the entire report online here.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
