New Statesman: The return of American fascism

 The role that patriotic symbolism, mass entertainment and a corporate state might play in an incipient American fascism was clear to astute observers at the time. In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here (1935), an American fascist dictatorship is brought about by the “Corporatist” party, led by the reactionary populist Buzz Windrip. Windrip takes power by forging alliances with media giants, including Father Prang, a character based on Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio show was listened to by millions of Americans at its height in the mid-1930s. Coughlin was virulently, and conspiratorially, anti-Semitic, disseminating the (fraudulent) Protocols of the Elders of Zion and confirming Nazi accusations of a Jewish-Communist plot for world domination led by a cabal of “international bankers”. Windrip whips his crowds to a frenzy with patriotic music and populist jingles about clearing the “rot” in Washington, taking power thanks to the carnival he’s created. “Great ­showmanship,” the reporter who serves as Lewis’s resistant voice of liberal democracy observes of Windrip’s performance. “PT Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better.” [...]

The absurdity of this bizarrely entertaining spectacle does not make it less dangerous, but more so. The clownish aspect of both Hitler and Mussolini were often noted at the time – not for nothing did Charlie Chaplin lampoon Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Ku Klux Klan was clownish, too, with its pointy hats, its puerile rituals, its risible attempts at occultism. As a historian observed in 1931, the Klan’s “preposterous vocabulary” and “infantile love of hocus-pocus” offered a “chance to dress up the village bigot and let him be a Knight of the Invisible Empire”. That didn’t make the Klan any less murderous.[...]

Historians of fascism have also demonstrated that all fascism is indigenous by definition. As Robert O Paxton explained in his seminal 1998 essay “The Five Stages of Fascism”, “authentic fascism is not for export” because all fascisms draw “their slogans and their symbols from the patriotic repertory of one particular community”. Paxton also noted that “religion, for example, would certainly play a much greater role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms”. [...]

Fascism is not a principled or ­ideological stand; it is the politics of grievance, an ­instrumentalist response to a ­political ­situation it perceives as unacceptable. ­Fascism is the counter-revolutionary politics of force, justified by ultra-nationalism, glorified by myths of ­regeneration and purification, performed by masculine cults of personality and sold as the will of the people.

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The Guardian: How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump’s wall

The border before Trump was no idyll. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups; dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Around this time, agents reported finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese troops would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes began calling Little ’Nam. [...]

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in those decades. But border patrol agents left to their own devices regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “for ever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break”. Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The border patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family. [...]

In neighbourhoods filled with undocumented residents, the patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On 18 April 1986, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the US side of the border’s chain-link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence, on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force. [...]

But the occupations did go wrong. Bush and his neoconservative advisers had launched what has now become the most costly war in the nation’s history, on the heels of pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation’s history. Yet news coming in from Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, Anbar province, Bagram and elsewhere began to suggest that Bush had created an epic disaster. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing US personnel cheerfully taunting and torturing Iraqis circulated widely, followed by reports of other forms of cruelty inflicted on prisoners by US troops. Many people were coming to realise that the war was not just illegal in conception but deceptive in its justification, immoral in execution, and corrupt in its administration. [...]

As the power of Ice and the border patrol grew, its impunity continued unabated. Since 2003, patrollers have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. According to a report by the ACLU, young girls have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children apprehended by the border patrol experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service”. It’s difficult to process this litany of abuse. The horrors blend into one another, as if the closing of the frontier has brought about a collapse of a sense of time. The violence that had been associated with moving outward in the world, which gave the illusion of leaving problems behind, now just accumulates. “We slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth,” writes a border patroller, describing what he and his coworkers did when they came upon a stash of supplies tucked away by hiding migrants. “We dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.”

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Pindex: Brexit 3: Globalists vs Nationalists. Facts, Illusions and Hidden Threats

Are nationalists really just racists? Or are globalists simply corporate sellouts? There are dark truths, strange surprises and true threats lurking in the shadows.

In Brexit part 3, we explore Trump’s nationalism, an alarming problem with the English identity, illusions about nationalists and globalists, and what it all means for Brexit.

The Guardian: Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth (Fri 3 Aug 2018)

Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a “war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding. Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name of science and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords. [...]

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral differences revealing themselves directly. But we need to start preparing for that eventuality, because denialism is starting to break down – and not in a good way.[...]

Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour. The heightened scrutiny of far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors. In August 2017, for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.” A piece published by the Daily Stormer in advance of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that same month ended: “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.” [...]

Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.” Nor are anti-vaxxers ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be released from the clutches of Big Pharma. [...]

It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are. It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews. It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.

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Vox: How gun ownership became a powerful political identity

If only gun owners had voted in the 2016 election, then Donald Trump would have won every single state save Vermont. If only people who don’t own guns had voted, then Hillary Clinton would have won every state, save West Virginia and maybe Wyoming.

SurveyMonkey, which conducted the poll reaching these conclusions, found that the voting divide between gun owners and non-owners was starker than divides between white and nonwhite Americans, between working-class whites and the rest of the nation, and between rural and urban voters. “No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy write.

That doesn’t mean that gun ownership is more important in explaining American political behavior than race or class or gender. But it does mean that gun ownership has an extremely strong correlation with conservative, pro-Republican voting. [...]

“Few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler writes in Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “After the Civil War, the Klan and other violent racist groups sought to reaffirm white supremacy, which required confiscating the guns blacks had obtained for the first time during the conflict.” He notes that a century later, in the 1960s, politicians turned to gun control measures to “disarm politically radical urban blacks, like the Black Panthers.” [...]

The gun gap could just be an artifact of other demographics. For instance, we know that for a whole host of historical reasons, black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats and whites mostly vote for Republicans; whites are also likelier to own guns, so the gap might reflect racial differences. Same goes for partisan gender gaps (women are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to own guns), rural/urban gaps, and so forth.

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openDemocracy: Why are women joining far-right movements, and why are we so surprised?

The core question posed by such pieces is: Why are women joining far-right movements? But we must also ask: Why are we so surprised? After all, these issues are not new. “What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate their rights? This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades,” is how one historian put it. [...]

“There’s no reason to expect women to be less bigoted than men,” historian Linda Gordon concluded. Her research into the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) estimated that at least 1.5 million American women were members in the 1920s, including one third of all white Protestant women living in Indiana. [...]

“Fascism’s relationship with women has been neither consistent nor predictable,” is Durham’s conclusion. While men may have been more visible in such movments, large numbers of women also participated as voters, members, fundraisers, marchers, party officials, and more. [...]

“Women's roles in far-right and neo-Nazi groups have in the past been underestimated,” she writes. Reports may focus on movement leadership and parliamentary politics, for instance, or front-line acts of violence, while underplaying the importance of emotional and reproductive labour. When one of the Golden Dawn Girls tells her grandchildren “to go play with guns,” Seth-Smith notes that this is also performing a key role for the party.

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The Atlantic: Memphis's Novel Strategy for Tearing Down Confederate Statues

In a surprise move Wednesday evening, Memphis’s city council voted to sell the two parks to a new private nonprofit corporation that will run them, on condition that they keep the parks public. Mayor Jim Strickland signed a contract with the nonprofit, Memphis Greenspace, on Friday, and the council ratified it. Soon afterward, Greenspace, which was incorporated in October, began removing the statues, with celebratory crowds gathering to watch, singing, “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” The statues have been removed to a place nobody can find, according to the city’s chief legal officer. [...]

Leaders in Memphis have long wanted to get rid of the statues. Tennessee seceded during the Civil War, though it was a hotbed of loyalism and sent more soldiers to fight for the Union than any other Confederate state. But while the Volunteer State is conservative at the state level, Memphis is not. The city is nearly two-thirds African American, and the presence of monuments to Davis, who led a traitorous revolt from the United States dedicated to maintaining black slavery, and Forrest, a Confederate general infamous for slaughtering surrendering black soldiers and for later co-founding the Ku Klux Klan, was offensive and nonsensical. [...]

Over the last few months, local officials in some jurisdictions have simply acted to remove monuments. In Birmingham, Alabama, another majority-black city saddled with a Confederate monument the local government detested, the city council and mayor decided in August to simply cover up a monument, drawing a lawsuit from the state government and more than $3 million in fines to date. In Durham, North Carolina, where state law prevents removal of monuments, a crowd of protesters gathered and tore down a statue commemorating Confederate soldiers that sat on the lawn of the former county courthouse.  

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Time: Why a Forgotten KKK Raid on a Gay Club in Miami Still Matters 80 Years Later

Eighty years ago this month, on Nov. 15, 1937, a raid took place at La Paloma nightclub in an unincorporated part of Dade County (modern-day Miami-Dade County). Unlike at Stonewall, law enforcement was not behind this Miami-area raid. Instead, nearly two hundred women and men from the Ku Klux Klan—wearing long, white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and struck fear—burned a fiery cross on public property and inducted several dozen new members that night. They then stormed La Paloma, roughed up staff and performers, and ordered the nightspot closed. They had been trying to shut it down for some time. At La Paloma, women performed stripteases on stage. Performers then known as “female impersonators” entertained paying customers, and effeminate men (or “pansies”) made crude sexual jokes to the audience’s delight. Gender and sexual non-conforming people not only staffed the club, they also represented a part of its clientele. As one contemporary observer recalled, “Homosexuals in evening gowns, trousered lesbians, and prostitutes” were among those who forged community in spaces like La Paloma. [...]

In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences. La Paloma, for example, soon reopened and, according to its manager, offered “spicier entertainment than ever.” One of the new skits rehearsed for its reopening was a satire of the Klan’s raid at its club, including performers wearing the white hooded robes.

Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change and even revolution. There are dozens more examples of such raids: Turkish Baths (New York City, 1929), Cooper’s Donuts (Los Angeles, 1959), Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco, 1966), and Black Cat (Los Angeles, 1967), among others.

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The New Yorker: Birth of a White Supremacist

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week. [...]

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish. [...]

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise. [...]

The idea of racial hierarchy seemed to hold enormous explanatory power. As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say—by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data didn’t show what they appeared to show. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But all those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such a basic affront to the underlying tenets of modern democracy that he would never run out of enemies.

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Vox: I've studied the history of Confederate memorials. Here's what to do about them.

But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition. [...]

A smaller number of monuments, like the one recently toppled in Durham, were indeed funded with public money — but an asterisk must be attached to the word “public.” In 1922, Confederate veterans in Durham persuaded the state legislature to allocate $5,000 of county taxes to fund the monument. No one asked black residents, who were denied the right to vote by Jim Crow laws, whether they supported spending their tax dollars on this public, political statement. [...]

It is hardly coincidence that the cluttering of the state’s landscape with Confederate monuments coincided with two major national cultural projects: first, the “reconciliation” of the North and the South, and second, the imposition of Jim Crow and white supremacy in the South. As part of the process of national reconciliation, white Northerners agreed to tolerate the commemoration of Confederates, and they contributed both moral support and funds to the veneration of a few Confederate figures in particular, especially Robert E. Lee. [...]

During the dedication speech, Carr praised Confederate soldiers not just for their wartime valor but also for their defense “of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years after the war” when “their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” The “four years after the war” was a clear reference to the period in which the Ku Klux Klan, a white paramilitary organization terrorized blacks and white Republicans who threatened the traditional white hierarchy in the state. Then he boasted that “one hundred yards from where we stand” — and within months of Lee’s 1865 surrender — “I horse whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because she had maligned and insulted a Southern lady.”

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The Atlantic: How Trump's Reaction to Charlottesville Threatens the GOP

Trump’s election “may be one of the most costly presidential victories in history for a political party, because [it is leaving] a crimson stain on the party,” said Peter Wehner, the former director of strategic planning in the George W. Bush White House. “I don’t think it … will be easy to get away from.” [...]

But Trump’s belligerent response to the unrest in Virginia has detonated this slowly burning fuse. His pointed refusal to unambiguously condemn the white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups who gathered there may crystallize, in a way no policy debate could, the picture of him as racially and culturally biased, particularly among younger voters. “The truth is, I bet that Millennials have not paid that much attention to the policy stuff he’s done,” said Andrew Baumann, a Democratic pollster who has extensively surveyed the generation. “But I think Charlottesville is a whole different thing. This is a watershed moment.”

The president’s reaction to Charlottesville closely followed the template he established for dealing with white supremacist David Duke during the 2016 GOP primaries. In late February of that year, Trump refused to directly disavow Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, when pressed by Jake Tapper during a CNN interview held two days before the largest concentration of Southern primaries. Only after those states had voted, and white nationalists had exulted in Trump’s evasive initial response, did the presidential contender explicitly renounce Duke’s support. [...]

Because Trump retains some irreducible support among younger whites, particularly those without college degrees, Baumann said the Charlottesville firestorm would likely do more to harden, rather than expand, that Millennial resistance. “I think he’s really cemented these views of Millennials, and I have a hard time believing there is much he can do to reverse that,” Baumann said. [...]

In a measure of the growing headwinds the party could face, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a prominent Republican pollster who has written a book on Millennials, told me this week that the absence of effective resistance from party leaders or voters to Trump’s posture has left her increasingly pessimistic the GOP can set a direction that will appeal to young people like her.

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Haaretz: Israel Under Trump: Welcome to the New Home of Nazi Denial

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained silence over the U.S. president’s having equated neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with the leftist counterprotesters who came under deadly attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the prime minister’s hand-picked communications minister declared that Israel’s relations with the White House take precedence over condemning Nazis. [...]

“We need to condemn anti-Semitism and any trace of Nazism, and I will do what I can as a minister to stop its spread,” said Kara. “But Trump is the best U.S. leader Israel has ever had. His relations with the prime minister of Israel are wonderful, and after enduring the terrible years of Obama, Trump is the unquestioned leader of the free world, and we must not accept anyone harming him.”

Even for Israel, where Beyond Belief is another name for the place all of us live in all the time, there seems something impossible, something bordering on science fiction, about this country lending a home to, well, Nazi denial. [...]

And this is the same Richard Spencer who praised Trump for aiding in the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust by omitting any mention of Jews from his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. [...]

But the interview was far from the only instance of an abhorrent phenomenon in an Israel under the influence of Donald Trump. It is the rise of Nazi denial – the desire among certain political and media figures associated with Netanyahu to curry favor with the U.S. president by downplaying or dismissing the dangers of the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who took part in the violence in Charlottesville.

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The Intercept: Donald Trump Has Been a Racist All His Life — And He Isn't Going to Change After Charlottesville

Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot: he was accused of ordering “all the black [employees] off the floor” of his Atlantic City casinos during his visits; claimed “laziness is a trait in blacks” and “not anything they can control”; requested Jews “in yarmulkes” replace his black accountants; told Bryan Gumbel that “a well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market”; demanded the death penalty for a group of black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park (and, despite their later exoneration with the use of DNA evidence, has continued to insist they are guilty); suggested a Native American tribe “don’t look like Indians to me”; mocked Chinese and Japanese trade negotiators by doing an impression of them in broken English; described undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; compared Syrian refugees to “snakes”; defended two supporters who assaulted a homeless Latino man as “very passionate” people “who love this country”; pledged to ban a quarter of humanity from entering the United States; proposed a database to track American Muslims that he himself refused to distinguish from the Nazi registration of German Jews; implied Jewish donors “want to control” politicians and are all sly negotiators; heaped praise on the “amazing reputation” of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has blamed America’s problems on a “Jewish mafia”; referred to a black supporter at a campaign rally as “my African-American”; suggested the grieving Muslim mother of a slain U.S. army officer “maybe … wasn’t allowed” to speak in public about her son; accused an American-born Hispanic judge of being “a Mexican”; retweeted anti-Semitic and anti-black memes, white supremacists, and even a quote from Benito Mussolini; kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches next to his bed; declined to condemn both David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; and spent five years leading a “birther” movement that was bent on smearing and delegitimizing the first black president of the United States, who Trump also accused of being the founder of ISIS. [...]

Yes, the U.S. has had plenty of presidents in recent decades who have dog-whistled to racists and bigots, and even incited hate against minorities — think Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Reagan and his “welfare queens,” George H.W. Bush and the Willie Horton ad, and the Clintons and their “super-predators” — but there has never been a modern president so personally steeped in racist prejudices, so unashamed to make bigoted remarks in public and with such a long and well-documented record of racial discrimination. [...]

We would do well to heed the words of those who have spent decades studying this bizarre president. “Donald is a 70-year-old man,” Trump biographer David Cay Johnston reminded me in the run-up to his inauguration in January. “I’m 67. I’m not going to change and neither is Donald.”

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America Magazine: When the K.K.K. came to town, Catholics prayed. Now what?

The K.K.K.’s visit to my city is the latest in a series of reactions to the efforts by the City of Charlottesville to critically examine its history of racism and slavery and the legacy of memorials in its public spaces. In April, the City Council in Charlottesville voted (3-2) to remove a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee and unanimously agreed to change the name of Lee Park to Emancipation Park. Jackson Park in Charlottesville (named after Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general) was renamed Justice Park. Though greeted with applause among many sectors of the community, retaliation against the city’s efforts has also been swift and fierce. Since then, Charlottesville has become a flashpoint for a variety of contentious national debates: how cities will deal with their tormented racial legacies; the appropriateness of Confederate symbols in public; questions of identity, the safety of minority communities, free speech and public protest. [...]

On July 8, about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights, a newer chapter of the Ku Klux Klan based in Pelham, N.C., held a rally in Justice Park. Their rally was met by an estimated 1,000-person counterprotest with representation from Black Lives Matter, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Solidarity CVille and the Charlottesville Clergy Collective. The Klan members carried Confederate flags and signs with anti-Semitic messages and engaged in a collective Nazi-style salute during the 45-minute rally. The chilling ritual concluded when they were escorted away by heavily armed police officers. A member of their group reported that they would retreat to private land for a cookout and a cross burning. [...]

On July 6, I received an email invitation from a local parish: “HOLY HOUR FOR PEACE AND THE END OF HATRED AND RACISM.” We would pray the rosary in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in anticipation of the K.K.K.’s rally. Frankly, I was surprised to receive an invitation of this nature from this particular parish. Like many Catholic parishes in the United States, this one almost never discusses race or racism in explicit terms, even as the body count of unarmed black men and women killed at the hands of police officers continues to climb. I quickly rearranged my schedule to be present with others for this prayer. [...]

Still, I wonder why I have never heard racism denounced in such clarion terms from a parish before. Will I hear it denounced so clearly again? Does the Catholic Church in the United States have the courage to stand up to racism before the K.K.K. comes to town? Or after the K.K.K. leaves town? Will our parishes stand in solidarity with those involved in nonviolent direct action in response to racial hatred?

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The Atlantic: Trump Isn't the Apotheosis of Conservatism

It’s certainly true that the United States has noteworthy traditions of illiberalism and political violence. The 1920s suffered terrorist violence not only at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but also those of anarchist bombers who maimed and killed hundreds of people from 1919 to 1921. From the Civil War to World War II, American labor relations were more violent than those of most other industrialized countries. Four presidents have been assassinated; four others—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—only narrowly survived or escaped a bullet. Race riots have ripped apart American cities for almost as long as there have been American cities.

Donald Trump’s campaign for president certainly drew much energy from this long tradition of political violence. So too did some of Trump’s opponents: Protests in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s Inauguration Day did damage to property, sent two police officers to hospital, and led to 200 arrests.  Smaller scale versions of this form of violent protest have targeted colleges—notably Berkeley and Middlebury—that have invited speakers whom rioters deemed sympathetic to Trump’s cause. [...]

Through most of the history of ideas, the great champions of equality have been xenophobes—not out of bigotry, but because they believed that only a tightly bonded society could suppress the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Let Jean-Jacques Rousseau speak for a tradition that commenced with the Greeks and continued to the Jacobins and beyond: The best leaders determine “that his people should never be absorbed by other peoples” and therefore “devised for them customs and practices that should could not be blended into those of other nations.” Ideally: “Each fraternal bond … among the individual members of his republic became a further barrier, separating them from their neighbors and keeping them from becoming one with those neighbors,” he wrote in his Considerations on the Government of Poland. As for more cosmopolitan societies, Rousseau had this disdainful comment in The Social Contract: “The people has less affection for the homeland which is like the whole world in its eyes, and for its fellow citizens, most of whom are foreigners to it.”

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The Guardian: Anti-Muslim hate groups nearly triple in US since last year, report finds

The number of organized anti-Muslim hate groups in America nearly tripled last year, from 34 to more than 100, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning non-profit that tracks extremist groups.

The center credited the “incendiary rhetoric” of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with fueling the rise in anti-Muslim hate, along with anger over terror attacks like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando last June. [...]

The new report found there are now more than 900 active hate groups across the US – from Ku Klux Klan chapters to neo-Nazi hubs to racist black separatist organizations – an uptick of less than 3% since 2015, according to the group’s annual count. This is slightly lower than the group’s all-time high count of 1,018 hate groups in 2011.

Trump’s meteoric rise in the past year electrified many of these racists and far-right extremists, the report concluded. At the same time, Trump’s campaign may have also drained energy from independent extremist rallies and gatherings, as far-right supporters chose instead to attend mainstream Trump rallies. The number of “in-person” extremist events declined in 2016, according to the report.

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JSTOR Daily: The History of the KKK in American Politics

White supremacism is on the rise again. The Ku Klux Klan supported Donald Trump for president. Former Klansman David Duke made a bid for the Louisiana Senate, hate incidents followed the election, and Trump named as White House senior counselor Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart.com, a website popular with white supremacists. This isn’t the first time that so-called white nationalists have been involved with American politics. In the 1920s, during what historians call the Ku Klux Klan’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of government.

The Klan didn’t start as a political force, but as a lark. Shortly after the Civil War ended, some Confederate veterans got together and played around with hoods and robes, wearing them while riding  horses through town in Pulaski, Tennessee. They formed a secret group with outlandish names for its officials, like “Grand Cyclops” for the leader. When they saw how their costumed rides scared blacks, the group turned to vigilantism. [...]

The Klan was a big issue in the 1872 presidential election, but the group was in its death throes. It rose again after the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation, when the country was reacting to many societal changes brought on by the temperance movement and World War I. This second-wave Klan emerged as a morality police to fight immigration, minorities, and the loose morals of speakeasies, bootlegging, and political corruption. While the first Klan focused on blacks, this wave also fought Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and anybody else it felt was hurting America. At heart, it was a nativist movement that drew sympathy from those who still saw blacks as unequal to whites.

Heavy marketing drove membership in the second Klan to between 3 and 7 million; that added up to a lot of commissions for recruiters, who got a percentage of member fees. The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens. A portion of the second-wave Klansmen murdered or beat those they considered un-American, but a majority saw the group as a social or even charitable club. Klaverns gave money to churches and helped other community groups such as baseball teams. Members celebrated holidays together and attended one another’s funerals.

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Politico: What Republicans Really Have to Do to Win Over Black Voters

Granted, Trump and his open bigotry ascending to the top of the party have done enormous harm to the cause and might reverberate for the next couple of decades. [...]

Let’s get a few things straight. You won’t be able to win over black voters by simply explaining the benefits of conservatism better, or reminding black voters that Frederick Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln, was a Republican, or that a sizable percentage of the party voted for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s and that the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was a young man, while neglecting to remind listeners he spent the rest of his life apologizing and trying to make up for that misstep. [...]

That’s why any meaningful attempt to reach black voters won’t begin with claiming that Democratic policies have all failed—as Trump obnoxiously said the other week, telling African-Americans their lives are so terrible they have “nothing to lose” by voting for him—because that’s simply not true. In the years before the war on poverty began, 55 percent of black Americans lived in poverty—a number that has since been cut in half, down to roughly 26 percent. Not only that, 71 percent of single black moms lived in poverty in 1959, a number that is down to about 37 percent. (Curiously, no conservative I’ve read has ever noted that while the much-discussed black out-of-wedlock rate has been climbing the past few decades the rate of poverty in single-female-led black families has been going down.) [...]

In the minds of black voters, the GOP is hostile to health reform that is saving and improving their lives; hostile to Wall Street regulations designed to prevent a repeat of an economic downturn the American Civil Liberties Union calculates will be costing black Americans dearly for maybe another decade and a half; hostile to economic initiatives by the nation’s first black president; and pretend not to hear when communities of color scream that one of the most vital solutions to curbing gun violence is doing something about the guns themselves. When black people bring up any of these issues to many conservatives, they are either ridiculed, told that what they are experiencing can’t really be so, or that a simple adoption of conservative values and principles—whatever that means in the age of Trump—is the elixir for black people’s ills.

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Salon: Milwaukee’s violent protests are no surprise: Even by American standards, the city has long mistreated its black community

To wit: the city of Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city in the United States and has been described as a “living hell for black people.” The neighborhood of Sherman Park is one of the poorest in the state of Wisconsin. In 2014, the median income for blacks in Milwaukee was $25,600, as compared to $62,600 for whites. Milwaukee is among the worst five cities in the United States on measures of racial equality. As detailed by reports from the Department of Justice on Baltimore and Ferguson, the black denizens of Milwaukee, like most other black and brown folks who live in similar communities, often see their rights and liberties violated by police and are treated as second-class citizens in their own country. [...]

Racism and class prejudice intersect in many ways in communities such as Milwaukee. Because of the enormous gap in wealth and income across the color line in the United States, racially segregated housing creates disparate outcomes in the quality of public schools, access to health care and public services such as mass transit. Racially segregated housing also increases poverty and violence by concentrating it in one community. It also limits intergenerational upward class mobility by creating social networks that are homogeneous by race and class. Consequently, racially segregated housing limits access to social capital and access to job opportunities that could enable poor and working-class people to improve their life circumstances. [...]

As was seen in the aftermath of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, the corporate news media (especially the right-wing echo chamber) would rather generate a sensational and exaggerated narrative about the recent unrest in Milwaukee than engage in a substantive discussion of the structural and institutional factors that nurtured it. There are many reasons for this. Most Americans are socialized from birth to believe in the twin myths of meritocracy and individualism. This makes systemic or systematic thinking about how social institutions and power interact to determine a given person’s life outcomes and life chances very challenging. In the post-Civil Rights era, a regime of “colorblind racism” deems that racism is narrowly defined as either something extreme and obvious (the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis) or alternatively as words, actions and intentions rather than outcomes and social structures.

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AP: Ku Klux Klan dreams of rising again 150 years after founding

In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, Klan leaders said they feel that U.S. politics are going their way, as a nationalist, us-against-them mentality deepens across the nation. Stopping or limiting immigration — a desire of the Klan dating back to the 1920s — is more of a cause than ever. And leaders say membership has gone up at the twilight of President Barack Obama's second term in office, though few would provide numbers. [...]

The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish protection group that monitors Klan activity, describes Barker's Loyal White Knights as the most active Klan group today, but estimates it has no more than 200 members total. The ADL puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000.

The Alabama-based SPLC says there's no evidence the Klan is returning to the strength of its heyday. It estimates the Klan has about 190 chapters nationally with no more than 6,000 members total, which would be a mere shadow of its estimated 2 million to 5 million members in the 1920s. [...]

Stopping immigration, not blocking minority rights, is the Klan's No. 1 issue today, Waller said. His group operates by the KKK rulebook called the "Kloran," which was first published in 1915. Various versions of the book are now online, and an edition posted by the University of Wisconsin library states in part: "We shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy and will strenuously oppose any compromise thereof in any and all things.

"The current hot-button issue for Klan members — fighting immigration and closing U.S. borders — is one of the most talked-about topics in the presidential election. Klan leaders say Donald Trump's immigration position and his ascendancy in the GOP are signs things are going their way.

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