The White Nationalist Roots of Trump

One of the more aggressive & virulent strands of the crypto-fascist Alternative Right (Alt-Right) that surrounds the Trump transition team is the racist ‘The Daily Shoah” (Shoah is Hebrew for the Holocaust). This is just one of the many white-nationalist voices one finds in their blog in support of Trumpism:

“Lets remember that we have 4 years to advance and build a pro-white movement (preferably, a Fascist movement) because after these 4 years the (((system))) and the Left will punish white people without any shred of mercy. A sense of urgency must permeate everything. Morals and ethics must be written up. A cohesive worldview must be constructed (preferably, based on Fascism.) Real life activism must take place (with Trump in office we can assume he will be more “lenient” towards demonstrations, etc). The Alt Right has potential but if this potential defaults to ANY type of “conservativism” (Paleo or otherwise), Libertarian philosophy, etc it will fail. Look at what white people did in this election. White people threw their entire weight behind Trump and white people got him elected, period. Imagine a few white fanatics started a real life movement, a culture, a new ideal, something real, and white people got behind it. Imagine what can be accomplished. We need to make white people moral, ethical, courageous, and brave again while Trump handles America. No defeatism is allowed, at all. It was a great joy to see millions and millions of our white brothers and sisters across the US come together acting as one race, proving that if white people wanted to solve ALL of our problems, we could do so.”

This ethno-nationalism is just one of the several strands of 21st century fascism to be found in the USA that is growing rapidly in cyber-space but more significantly finding resonance within the wider Trump movement.

The establishment sounding National Policy Institute (NPI) has mobilized a number of neo-fascist groups that are associated with the modern messages of their hyper-nationalism-“falsehood, fear and fraud” fueled by shock-jock radio and Fox.

636046068655859333-APTOPIX-GOP-2016-Conv-CoopThe NPI defines themselves explicitly as “ an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world”. Since the Trump victory there is a confidence and arrogance that characterizes these new socio-political organizations. Here is one of their contributors( and there are many , many more)

“We won Brexit. We killed the Bush Dynasty.We killed the Clinton Dynasty. We got Trump elected, despite being outspent, despite being outnumbered, despite the full weight of the entire establishment, left and right. White nationalism is now everywhere, and starting to become accepted amongst whites. We have done more in a few years than the entire conservative establishment did in generations, and we did it without the PACs, the NGOs, the think tanks and the money. Young rightists will look to us for inspiration, because unlike the arthritic brain dead conservative establishment, we fight, we win and our foes actually fear us”.

What they are seeing post-Trump is “the absence of moral restraint” encouraged by his outrageous campaign utterances. They sense that the door has been opened to allow a new freedom to ridicule, denigrate and oppress minorities, Greens, Gays and indeed the entire liberal cultural community. “Make America Great Again” is a slogan that is interpreted as Make America White Again while “Lock Her Up” represents the cry of misogyny threatening all liberated progressive women.

hillary-clinton-republican-national-convention-hatred-17388a16-e731-4c24-b476-3ff3fd523be6Yet there is beyond the several strands of bitter anger and resentment: the ethic nationalism, sexism, the fury vented at the alien others including the liberal intelligentsia there is the core unifying feature of this new fascism –the attack on ALL forms of liberalism. Not simply social liberalism but anti -global economic liberalism: “a strong nation is represented by strong barriers.” (Alt-Right)

We hear it in Brexit as we see it in Trumpism. (The US Alt-Right finds echoes of support in elements of Brexit mainly in the “intellectual” crypto –fascists of the quaintly named “Traditionalist Britain Group” headed up by a hereditary Lord with echoes of Oswald Moseley with the slogan “all men are created unequal”.

Yet we have been warned of this Trumpism and his fascist fan club and warned for a very long time. One of the better voices on the left Richard Rorty in his book, “Achieving Our Country,” promoted a pragmatic progressive socialism over what he regarded as the cultural socialism of post-structuralists like Foucault. Listen to the clarity of his words and realize we had been warned:

“The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet”.

Comments (32)

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  1. Fiona says:

    An Alt-Right version of Sharia Law?

  2. Alan says:

    One of the better voices on the left Richard Rorty in his book, “Achieving Our Country,” promoted a pragmatic progressive socialism over what he regarded as the cultural socialism of post-structuralists like Foucault.

    This statement suggests a remarkable level of ignorance of Foucault and for that matter Rorty himself.

    1. Frank says:

      I agree. It is factually incorrect to refer to Foucault as a cultural socialist. This is yet another example of an author name dropping a big intellectual in order to look clever.

      1. Alan says:

        For a discussion of Rorty’s relationship to Foucault see Małecki’s ‘If Happiness Is Not the Aim of Politics, Then What Is?’: Rorty versus Foucault. Rorty’s critique is more a critique of the Left’s (mis)appropriation of Foucault than Foucault himself. Also very much worth reading is the Bess interview with Foucault cited at the end: Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual. (My link should work, unlike the now expired link in the Małecki’s paper.)

  3. Jo says:

    I find one-sided and mega-hostile articles like this very unhelpful. To be honest, I’m sick of them.

    Whether we like it or not this man Trump was elected and won significant support. We cannot argue with that. To respond by churning out article after article going on about white-anything is to ignore the fact that many very ordinary people in America voted for Trump. Are they all to be labelled too and associated with the groups highlighted in this article? I think that is arrogant and completely wrong.

    Why are so many people writing this divisive hateful stuff because Hillary lost? Can none of them see that, maybe, just maybe…..Hillary was the problem? They will say nothing bad about all the Clintons have come to stand for or about her track record in particular. They don’t seem to understand that many Americans who would normally vote Democrat could not bring themselves to vote for her. Why was she even allowed to stand?

    If questions are to be asked then the Democrats should be the ones questioned. For, ultimately, they handed victory to Trump through their shenanigans, through their treatment of Sanders and their decision to ignore all the things that could cost them victory…….particularly the baggage carried by Clinton. If anyone is to blame it is the Democratic Party.

    1. J Galt says:

      Are you tried of all this marvellous cleverness too jo?

    2. c rober says:

      Hilary isnt the Problem , nor is Trump.

      The wealthy that are the politicians are the problem , combined with the system , and the stupidity of populist soundbites they believe , that will never be delivered , focused and tailored to suit.

      The white house election is for a president without an real power , the senate is for power , and protection of wealth is the power desired.

      Every single thing in America is geared towards is making the rich richer , protecting that wealth from erosion , and eking every last drop down from their electorate to their very dying moment.

      Whether one likes Trump , a billionaire liar , or Clinton again a liar , is regardless. The American public has voted in an openly facist presidency including his advisers , in the misguided belief that he wants to break the very system for the benefit of the poor.

      The senators are bankrolled by the wealthy to get into power , where more than half now are millionaires , presidents are bankrolled to get into power. Those lines of credit need repaid , and that is protecting the wealth of those that picked up the tab.

      Sure the swamp needs drained , but the water will only go somewhere else to keep it that way.

  4. Peter Arnott says:

    I was very interested to read the quote from the anticipating that the left will come back and punish them unless they act decisively now. It was precisely pre-emptive fear of revenge that fueled the worst excesses in Serbian Bosnia..and yes, afraid so, in the Third Reich. “We have to get them before they get us” was roughly the logic of the real Shoah

  5. w.b.robertson says:

    well said Jo…the Democrat voters would not vote for this 69-yr-old with a track record. They knew the score.

  6. Redgauntlet says:

    Remember the reaction of Obama – “the great liberal Obama” – and Blair and Brown and Cameron, and the BBC and the liberal Establishment in general when the Snowden files were released and we protested, some of us real democrats protested, when it was revealed that the US had been spying systematically on millions of Europeans and Americans?

    Remember how we were told that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear..”

    Did they not say that to us? A gazillion times? With disdain and condescension?

    Did they not tell us, the wolf in sheep’s clothing “liberal” establishment, that “if we had nothing to hide we had nothing to fear” again and again?

    Well, now all of that illegally gathered information on the private lives of Western citizens, including their political opinions, is in the hands of a bunch white supremacists, a bunch of fascists. The same people who are also running a State with thousands of spies and military personnel on European soil, not to mention nuclear weapons…

    The vast majority of us had “nothing to hide” but now all of us, without exception, have plenty to fear…and its name is American fascism.

    1. c rober says:

      Nothing to fear – Well apart from state sanctioned fabrication and persecution , and repeated trials until your broke due to the removal of double jeopardy , but then again that was SNP that introduced that one – creating more income for their legal brothers and sisters.Which is somewhat ironic considering they , WM , have been spying on Holyrood since its inception.

      What has our leaders in Holyrood done with the Scots law to hold its WM spies to task , feck all.

  7. Neil Anderson says:

    I cannot understand why anyone is surprised by this. From the point when Europeans first set foot on this benighted continent there has been an aggressive policy of fascism (for want of a better term) in place. The near genocide of the native people, followed by the expansion into – and subjugation of – it’s southern neighbours started the process which has brought us to the point we find ourselves at today.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

    In my own lifetime I have witnessed the fascist expansionism of the American Empire. What have we all been witnessing? Constant and merciless oppression, no less.

    Have we been blinded by our fanatical demonising of Eastern cultures? When have these Eastern cultures ever made any real attempt to dominate us?

    All of my life I have looked suspiciously across the Atlantic at our so-called friend and seen nothing other than an aggressive bully with a chaotic household. Hollywood and television have been our influences and we’ve imagined a falsehood to be reality. Wake the fuck up!

    1. Alan says:

      Credit where credit is due. They were ably tutored by the British Empire.

    2. c rober says:

      Agree neil , except you are forgetting southern Europe and the MOORS , but i get your points.

    3. leavergirl says:

      The winner of the American election ran as anti warmonger-Clinton. I would have thought people here against warmongering would have been glad. But noooo…

  8. Yan says:

    The politically correct henchmen of the totalitarian left running for the cover of the liberal safe space while screaming fascist at their accusers.

    1. c rober says:

      Funny that , been watching the beeb trying to go back to liberal on the English news , as scotbeeb goes on the snp are keeping Scotland poor agenda…. week long BTW.

      The English news this week commenting on the disproportionate amount of Black people being jailed for crime , whereas in Scotland the catholic is the disproportionate black in its jails – but hay not a peep.

      “white Scots catholic lives matter” , just too many letters to put on a liberals t shirt.

      For only one pound a week…….

      1. Yan says:

        Bad enough being an incarcerated disproportionate even worse when progressive (Scottish) civil society applauds and celebrates that incarceration as just deserts for the aggravated crime of white privilege, then destroys any hope the prisoner may have had by mocking and disparaging the Christian faith.

        Pepe the thought crime agitator.

  9. Willie says:

    Trump and Farage are simply the product of a failed system. Failed systems deliver fascist leaders. Germany and Italy being prime examples. And if we don’t get a move on here in Bonnie Scotland with its fuel poverty, food banks, et al, don’t think our populace will be any different.

    1. Our Donald says:

      More importantly Trump is the product of a Scottish mother, and he certainly displays he has inherited a good deal of Scottish traits. America was born out of Scottishness and will be saved by that very same Scottishness through Donald’s application of the power of his own Scottishness. There is every chance he may prove to be the most significant American President ever. For all you doubters out there remember this date for revisiting. And if you doubt that America was shaped by Scottishness then you are ignorant and in need of a history lesson. Just for starters Scots were the first immigrants to arrive en mass that could both read and write and had a trade other than farming. Go and learn about the rest it is a weighty tome.

  10. Willie says:

    Vote for Remain in the UK else you will be out of the EU. Vote for remain in the UK to retain your pension. Support the Good Friday Agreement and the Belfast Agreement. I want this to be the most powerful devolved government et al ( aka the Vow ) …….and then, and we all know this, consider exactly what voting actually delivers. And then wonder why people consider alternatives. The Genie is now out of the bottle again, history may be ready to repeat, and we sadly may not be immune.

  11. Graeme Purves says:

    Apart from Jo and Peter, there is nothing but weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth on this string. I suppose the article set the tone.

  12. kailyard rules says:

    …”LOCK HER UP” represents the cry of misogyny threatening all liberated progressive women”. and the rest of it.

    A hyperbolic klaxon of sputter and helter-skelter reaction.

    1. Jim Bennett says:

      Aren’t you concerned at all that one candidate’s promise, met with the snarling support of armed right-wing militias, to lock an opponent up should cause some concern?

      Do you really think these people want to see a proper investigation? Due process? An independent judicial system? No, they want to see the first serious woman candidate for the Presidency jailed to intimidate others who may take her place.

      The rights of women in the US will be eroded significantly over the next four years. However, more subtly, the message has gone out to backward reactionary men: you have license get your women under control.

      1. leavergirl says:

        Jim: Complete nonsense. Of course we want due process regarding Clinton, and the Clinton Foundation – something that would have been out of the question if Clinton had been elected. And to suggest that unless we women vote for an abysmal candidate as long as she is a woman else we are misogynists is just more risible hatemongering.

      2. kailyard rules says:

        A female POTUS, regardless of her moral/criminal failings, is then ok as long as it does not upset some feminist agenda? Your last sentence is further hyperbole. Statistics show a good number of women from across the various areas of the electorate voted Trump.

        Having said what I’ve said here (and above) does not mean I’m misogynistic or a fan of Trumpism. I’m aware there is an Amerikkka within America but let’s put the tar and feathers away for an interim period until it’s sure which direction Trump is allowed to take.

  13. Reconstituted information ( NEWS) says:

    What we are really seeing is the destruction off the fourth estate, the most vital organ. Of the NWO, without which it would not exist. Scotland would be an independent nation today if the case for independence was not opposed 100 per cent by the MSM. Trump by taking them on fearlessly has show the world how hollow they really are, and how easily they can be turned to advantage by calling them out and not adopting a defensive position. Scotland should adopt the same strategy at the next independence referendum. Attack and expose them straight from the get go, destroy any cedibility of position or opinion they hold by exposing their vested interests both their own and corporate crony associates, and of course the establishment.You can have great fun by making the news givers, the news. I know, I worked for Rupert Murdoch for over 25 years in Australia, and I can promise you they are just a bunch of disreputable word warriors that would fold immediately if anything effected them personally. Strap yourselves in people this is going to be a most rewarding ride, for the ordinary person that is.

  14. George Gunn says:

    Thom Cross’s piece was as much information as it was a warning. I know that all US Presidents have checks and balances – so much so that Obama was stymied almost totally. But there is something very sinister both about Trump and where the US is headed. No-one can afford to be complacent. Hitler was also elected by a population who had a grievance – it was called 1918. In 1939, by defending herself against a totalitarian state, Britain (until 1945, some would argue it is on-going) turned herself into a social and political mirror of what she was supposed to be fighting. Fighting for “freedom” between 1939 and 1945 no-one in Britain was actually “free”. Perhaps the EU is not going to survive the possible election of right wing governments across Europe next year or the year after. I see no relenting from the stiff hostility to Scottish self-determination from the Conservative party in power. Dithering on Brexit is their adopted policy and dithering has been the political philosophy of the ruling English elite for centuries, until they see something that is to their benefit. Thom Cross is a perceptive commentator and we need more of his observations to combat complacency and dithering.

  15. john young says:

    Reconstituded information you are right and it has amazed/did-appointed me that never once did I see/hear anyone from the pro indy group ever pick up on the media/presenters getting into their faces and asking them to explain themselves asking them about their agendas facing them down,instead meekly carry on and let it slip away,Iwould challenge them on every point.

    1. c rober says:

      If the SNP want a indy 2 win then they have to change – to fight the system , or they are the system.

      Without the SNP taking to task the BBC , DWP , for its daily salvoes on the SNP and on the Scottish people , then its shows they cannot fight – or dont want to fight.

      But then why should they if they will still be elected on the failure of the supply the party core mandate anyway?

      Indy 2 is the last fight of the SNP – of course they are reluctant to start as the bell rings signalling the round being started , because if they fail this time then its not round over , its match over.

  16. George Gunn says:

    No it is not. Scottish independence does not depend on the SNP. It depends on the Scottish people. Set pieces and stand offs are attractive to dramatists. History tends to pass them by and work like sand or water, destabilising the foundations of certainty.

  17. old battle says:

    Tonight (Tuesday) on Ch 4 there is footage of a meeting in Washington DC with
    the National Policy Institute (see above) with Fascist salutes. This is not going away. The alt-right is a political challenge that must be recognised and combatted here, not just there.

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