There are plenty of reasons-- both real and concotted out of the thin air between the ears of your typical GOP hate monger-- to be repulsed at the idea of voting for Hillary Clinton. (Personally, I'd never do it.) But there are no legitimate reasons for anyone to cast a ballot to elect someone of Señor Trumpanzee's caliber and character to the presidency of the United States.Trump fans may not know what "diverse" means but they know they want less of it... and that's what they interpret making America great again to mean. And if that wasn't just fine with Señor Trumpanzee, he wouldn't have brought alt-right sociopath Steven Bannon on to run his campaign. Sure the vast majority of Trump fans-- even the occasional ones you see who climbed into a suit and tie for his rallies-- are two-digit IQ losers who hate the world and their miserable existences and want to see it all end. But then there really are the alt-right leaders portrayed this weekend by Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast.
In a windowless room in a swanky hotel half a block from the White House on Friday afternoon, three of the most visible leaders of the Alt-Right movement held a two-hour press conference to discuss their affection for Donald Trump and their hopes for a white homeland. The white supremacist Alt-Right movement has grown over the last eight years or so, incubated in racist forums like StormFront and meme-loving corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan. Its members generally share a disdain for political correctness, feminism, zionism, Jews in general, immigration (especially Hispanic and Muslim immigration), and anyone who criticizes them for holding these views.And the Alt-Right won substantial mainstream media attention when Hillary Clinton gave a speech last month excoriating Donald Trump for some of his staffers’ ties to it. Clinton’s team zeroed in on the campaign’s new CEO, Steve Bannon, who formerly helmed a website that he himself once described as “the platform for the Alt-Right.” And prominent Alt-Right figures, including two of the men who helmed Friday’s press conference, told The Daily Beast last month that they were delighted Trump hired him.The three Alt-Right leaders who gathered in D.C. this afternoon made two things very clear: They think white people are genetically predisposed to be more moral and intelligent than black people, and they do not want to share their envisioned utopian ethno-state with folks of the Jewish persuasion. There’s some disagreement in the Alt-Right on what they refer to as “the Jewish question.” But the big take-away was that Jews are suspicious.Jared Taylor, who founded the white supremacist American Renaissance site, explained the Alt-Right as predicated entirely on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others—the movement, he said, is “in unanimity” in rejecting “the idea that the races are basically equivalent and interchangeable.” There are genetic differences in race that make some races more ethical and intelligent than others, he said. That’s what the Alt Right is all about....One more Alt-Right platform plank: that white people, as a group, have discrete interests that are different from other races’, and that they should push for those interests. In practice, this means the Alt-Right thinks school integration was bad and Apartheid was good. Later in the press conference, Taylor said he thinks white people are more moral and more intelligent than black people....[T]hey just want white people to have their own homeland.With no Jews.Spencer in particular fixates on the homeland idea.The Alt-Right needs to aspire to something, even if that dream won’t come true in his lifetime-- and that means they should aim to build an ethno-state for just whites. And Spencer made it clear that white-only means Jews aren’t invited. They have their own identity, and it isn’t white-slash-European, and that’s that.“Jews are Jews,” he said.He added that his whites-only utopia would still have a good relationship with Israel.These people (I hope) sound sad and racist and antisemitic and deeply confused to you. But they don’t sound that way to Breitbart, the right-wing news site to which Trump has given countless exclusives and from which he pulled his new campaign boss. The site has seen its traffic skyrocket over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, rapidly gaining clout in the conservative movement and among Trump-loving voters. The site says it had 31 million visitors in July. And in March, it ran a piece describing Taylor, Spencer, and their ilk as “fearsomely intelligent,” and praising them for speaking truth to power or whatever.So the Alt-Right-- helmed by the trio who gathered at The Willard on Friday—is the most extreme example of a shift on the American right: away from a nostalgic conservative focus on restoring the values of the Founders, and towards a forward-focused nationalism that prioritizes drastic limits on immigration and open hostility to globalism. Trump isn’t a white nationalist. But he speaks their language. And they dig it.
A YouGov poll last January discovered that 20% of Trump supporters were willing to admit they didn't approve of Lincoln freeing the slavesHillary was wrong when she said that half of the Trump supporters were from a basket of deplorables. Sad as it sounds, it's probably a much higher percentage. Writing in June for New York, Ed Kilgore reported that "there's an ongoing debate in the chattering classes about the deepest motives of those who support Donald Trump for president. One theory is that it’s cultural change — epitomized by immigration and the spread of non-Christian religious views — that makes these folks tick. Another is that it’s a product of economic inequality and insecurity. Those who hold the latter view tend to think Trump has some natural appeal to Bernie Sanders voters, to the point of sometimes seeming to suggest that Trumpenproletariats just need to bone up on their Piketty in order to find their true gospel in democratic socialism."
But now comes the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and Brookings with a new survey that adds powerful ammunition to the "It’s the Culture, Stupid!" faction. It covers many issues related to the changing demographics of America and the perceived impact on the culture for good and for ill. And it does not always break out Donald Trump supporters from broader categories like Republicans and white, working-class members. But where it does, it paints a pretty clear picture of a group of people who absolutely hate the changes taking place in this country since the 1950s, and will support almost any measures to turn back the clock.You can get a full sense of the comparative views of Trump supporters by reading the entire report, but just listing some of their perceptions in a row will give a good sense of how strongly these folks resent cultural change:• 77 percent say it bothers them to come into contact with people who speak little or no English.• 81 percent say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.• 77 percent say discrimination against Christians in the U.S. is a major problem.• 83 percent say the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influences.• 83 percent say the values of Islam are at odds with America’s values and way of life.• 80 percent say immigrants constitute a burden on American society.• 68 percent say the country has changed mostly for the worse since the 1950s.And here’s the scariest one:
• 72 percent say we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.There wasn’t a follow-up question about the willingness to break some heads, but I think we all know the answer to that one.