People were aghast when Donald Trump supported the violent protest of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of them ran over a peacefully protesting woman, and she died. Less than a year into his election, POTUS finally held a press conference on neo-Nazis. A reporter asked the seminal question that exposed Trump’s personal infrastructure of hate.
A reporter asked, according to The POLITIFACT:
‘Let me ask you, Mr. President, why did you wait so long to blast neo-Nazis?’
Trump was defensive:
‘I didn’t wait long. I didn’t wait long.’
The reporter held firm, “Forty-eight hours.” The president responded with weasel words:
‘I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct — not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement.
The reporter responded with this question, “So you had to (inaudible) white supremacists?” Trump was not making much sense:
‘I brought it. I brought it. I brought it.’
Then, the journalist said:
‘Was it terrorism, in your opinion, what happened?’
POTUS took weasel-wording to the next level:
‘As I said…we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America. And then it went on from there. Now, here’s the thing –‘
The president continued:
‘You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs — and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch.’
Trump tried to balance out the playing field:
‘But there is another side. There was a group on this side. You can call them the left — you just called them the left — that came violently attacking the other group.’
The reporter continued:
‘(Inaudible) … both sides, sir. You said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides. Are the –‘
The president interrupted:
‘Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides — I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say.’
The questioner said:
‘The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest –‘
Once again, Trump interrupted:
‘Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.’
Trump’s campaign has been receiving thousands of dollars, contributed by a well-known neo-Nazi leader Morris Gulett in addition to other racist extremists, according to The Daily Beast. Gulett brought an Aryan Nations [Church of Jesus Christ Christian] to Louisiana.
This was no mistake. Trump’s campaign has been accepting the money since December 2017 in 29 separate transactions. A racist employer/contributor who tried to impose his beliefs on his employees was sued. He had tried to give them $1,000 to marry and $1,000 for having babies, calling it a “procreation bonus.” He said he wanted to stop minority groups from outnumbers white people in the US.
People might wonder why Beo-Nazis support the man who occasionally sits in the Oval Office. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said that the number of “Patriot groups” mushroomed when President Barack Obama took office. One woman with an advanced degree feared that Obama would exact revenge upon white Americans for past infringements.
The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is “America’s largest neo-Nazi group.” SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok defined “Patriot groups,” according to The Vox Magazine:
‘[These] anti-government radical groups, we went from about 150”[to] something like 1,360 groups in 2012.’
During a national rally, the leaders were interested in how Trump has helped ignite white supremacism and brought it into the “mainstream.” The president gave the group legitimacy. NSM Commander Jeff Schoep said:
‘Some of the things that [Trump] is saying are issues that we have been tackling for years now.’
Potok said:
‘Just a year or two ago, a lot of the things that Trump says — the idea, for instance, of banning Muslims from this country — were considered really beyond the pale of political life in the United States. Now, those kinds of ideas are, in effect, normalized.’
The US is not the only country with a neo-Nazi/Fascist resurgence. In Germany, the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) Party has about 35,000 members. The German Alternative Party shot dead a man on video who defended Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pro-refugee policies.
Anti-AfD organizer Robert Fietzke said, The Daily Beast wrote:
‘It makes people angry that, even though people are being murdered, there are politicians who do not appear to understand how dangerous this party is.’
The AfD, CDU, FDP coalition of 9,000 individuals came to Erfurt, which is Thuringia’s capital. Their signs read:
‘No pact with fascists.’
AfD punishes anyone who criticizes it, ever since it was elected into state parliament in 2014:
‘[It wants to] cut funding for civil society initiatives—including those that offer advice on how to recognize and confront far-right ideas and the people promoting them.’
Featured image was a screenshot via YouTube.
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
