Trump, Palin, the KKK - Today's Republican Party

As Joe Jervis reports. Sarah Palin, a/k/a the idiot of Wasilla, always an attention whore, praised Donald Trump's tweet that repeated a white supremacist meme that hearkens back to the Nazi era: "We must secure the existence of our people & a future 4 white children." It is a mind set that has grown over the years in the Republican Party to a point that it is sadly, mainstream in the party.  All made respect least in racist circles - by Der Trumpenführer, arguably the foulest individual to ever occupy the White House.  The tweet certainly leaves little room for non-whites in Trump's America.  Meanwhile, yesterday Charlottesville, Virginia, probably the most liberal city in Virginia witnessed a gathering of KKK members protesting the city's proposed removal of a statute of Robert E. Lee from a public park.  Even some 45+ years ago when I began my undergraduate days at the University of Virginia, such a gather of Klan members would have been unthinkable.  But not in Trump's America. The Washington Post looks at events in Charlottesville where fortunately a much larger counter protest turned out.  Here are excerpts:

A rally here by the Ku Klux Klan and its supporters to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee encountered a loud and angry counterprotest Saturday afternoon.

Members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which is based in Pelham, N.C., near the Virginia border, gathered at Justice Park, situated in a quiet, leafy residential neighborhood in downtown Charlottesville. They shouted “white power,” and some wore white robes. . . . approximately 1,000 counterprotesters who greeted them with jeers. Attempts by Klan leaders to address the crowd were repeatedly drowned out by boos and chants. Some of the Klan members arrived armed, carrying handguns in holsters at their belts.

The rally was held about a block away from Emancipation Park — the renamed Lee Park — where the statue of Lee astride a horse still stands.

“It is important for me to be here because the Klan was ignored in the 1920s, and they metastasized,” said Jalane Schmidt, a professor at the University of Virginia who has been among those leading the call for the Lee statue removal. “They need to know that their ideology is not acceptable.”

“I teach about slavery and African American history, and it’s important to face the Klan and to face the demons of our collective history and our original sin of slavery. We do it on behalf of our ancestors who were terrorized by them.”

The Klan says the city’s decision to remove the Lee statue is part of a wider effort to get rid of white history.

“They’re trying to erase the white culture right out of the history books,” Klan member James Moore said Thursday.

Brandi Fisher, of Ridgeley, W.Va., drove hours to attend the rally.

“I don’t agree with everything the Klan believes, but I do believe our history should not be taken away,” said Fisher, 41. “Are we going to remove the Washington and Jefferson memorials because they were slave owners?”

Charlottesville is already planning for another protest next month. Several white nationalist groups have a permit for an Aug. 12 rally also calling for the council’s decision on the statue to be reversed.

My New Orleans born grandmother would have had a two word term for the KKK protesters: white trash.  In her mind, white trash was the lowest thing one could be.  But not nowadays in the Republican Party.