August 26, 2015

Trump lovers champion "white power"

Confederate fantasies & the Donald Trump surge: Inside the dangerous Southern mythology creeping into the GOP primary

Earlier this week, Ken Burns blew the lid off of this election's most unsettling developments

By Bob Cesca
All of these unforgivably horrifying films, and many others, were produced in service of casting blacks as villains, and Southerners as forlorn heroes who—whoops!—bungled their way into a war.

Sadly, this attitude is alive and kicking in 2015. Indeed, it’s being fed and exploited by the Republican Party frontrunner. It’s no mistake that Ken Burns called out Donald Trump’s involvement with the Birther movement as a clever form of saying the “n-word”—as a means of demonizing a leader, President Obama, based solely on the color of his skin, just as the Lost Cause had done so many decades earlier.

And as if on cue, a Trump supporter at a rally over the weekend shouted “white power” during Trump’s remarks. Why? Because Trump is encouraging and actively courting these kinds of people.

Worse, a Trump spokesman appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and refused to repudiate the supporter’s words, saying: “I know there were 30-plus thousand people in that stadium. They were very receptive to the message of ‘making America great again’ because they want to be proud to be Americans again.” Subtext anyone? During the same segment and in response to an attack on an Hispanic homeless man in Boston by two alleged Trump supporters, the spokesman replied, “We should be proud of our country, proud of our heritage, and continue to be the greatest country in the world.” Yep, it’s impossible to be more tone-deaf than that.
Comment:  For more on Donald Trump, see Trump Lovers Want a Strongman and Trump Promises "Normalcy" aka Whiteness.

No comments: