White Supremacists Celebrate Midterms as a Victory

Despite the fact that Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in last week's midterm elections, white supremacists are puffing themselves up and claiming that they were the real victors.  Why?  Because what for years had been becoming an largely unspoken plank of the GOP agenda is now overt under Donald Trump: racists and white supremacists are openly welcome in the Republican Party.  (In Virginia, defeated GOP candidate Corey Stewart ran on a openly racist platform).  This reality, combined with the fact that Trump openly displays his racism and the re-election of some of the most racist GOP members of Congress - e.g.. Steve King - has white supremacists cheering.  The big question and fear is whether or not they will put their bigotry into action against non-whites.  A piece in CNN looks at this cancer on America.  Here are article highlights:

White supremacists are saying they were winners in last week's midterm elections.

They were already emboldened by the language used by President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration -- words like "nationalist" and "invasion" that have hateful dual meanings -- according to a review of sites frequented by white supremacists. And they saw Tuesday's results as a victory for white America with what they believe will be progress toward a border wall, an end to DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, and birthright citizenship.
 Memes and commentary on the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site bashed nonwhite candidates who did not win, as well as losses by Republicans not seen as Trump loyalists.

"This changed history. It cleared away any of the remaining fog of confusion about what exactly we are dealing with in this country," Daily Stormer founder and publisher Andrew Anglin wrote.
 Anglin was buoyed by the win of Rep. Steve King in Iowa, even after King was pilloried for meeting with a far-right Austrian group linked to Nazis and retweeting an avowed Nazi sympathizer. King, a Republican, says he was unaware of the Nazi links in both those instances, but he has used racially charged and anti-immigrant rhetoric for years.
 King still won with 50.6% of the vote in Iowa's deeply conservative 4th Congressional District. In Illinois, Arthur Jones, a self-declared Holocaust denier and former leader of the American Nazi Party tallied almost 56,000 votes, more than a quarter of the total, standing for the GOP in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District. "Steve King won," Anglin wrote. "If last night was a referendum on Steve King's white nationalism, as the Democrats were trying to frame it, then white nationalism won."

On the campaign trail for Sen. Ted Cruz fighting for re-election in Texas, Trump declared, "I'm a nationalist, OK? I'm a nationalist."   A commenter on the 4chan bulletin board joked Trump was winking at them.

Earlier, another poster declared Trump was venerated by white supremacists: "What Dems, all leftists and pundits do not understand is that TRUMP is patriots' and Western/American Heritage's CHAMPION." To Alcindor, Trump repeated two more times how racist the question was. But he also never flatly denounced white supremacists. They were overjoyed, calling the press conference "glorious," and "beautiful" on 4chan, with one commenter writing: "I am honestly in awe of this man as a leader." "It doesn't take an overt slur for these individuals to basically become emboldened and to recognize and be excited by policies that they see would further their goals," said Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "When they hear [Trump] the President say things like, 'I'm not a racist,' they turn around amongst themselves and say, 'He just has to say that for practical reasons,' 'he just has to say that basically to get himself cover, to do the things that we want him to do,'" Hankes says. What is not clear is if any extremists will follow words with violence, as allegedly happened with Robert Bowers, who has pleaded not guilty to killing 11 people at a synagogue late last month, allegedly because he believed Jews were helping "invaders."

On places like 4chan, false talk of the migrant caravan as "invaders" has taken over on some of the message boards and become a popular meme topic. Analysts say "the browning of America" where whites become a minority is what the white supremacists fear most. There are threads with memes containing photos doctored to look like people breaking down walls at the US border with Mexico. There are jokes about how the traditional rush of Black Friday shoppers is nothing compared to what would happen next. In another thread on 4chan, commentators speculate about how many people would be shot as they come over the border. The thread appeared to reference Trump's comment that US troops on the border could fire on someone in the migrant caravan if the person threw rocks or stones. "All of them," one poster wrote of a possible casualty count. "Not enough," said another.
 The administration's approach to immigration in particular has "electrified" many racists, Hankes said, "to the point where they're begging their followers to go out and find ways to put Republicans in office." "They believe it will be easier for these policies to sail through," he said. "And these are things that they think are essential for creating a white ethno-state." Perhaps this election did energize white nationalists to vote, if they thought they had a champion in government. But there is also the fear -- and the example -- of men taking matters into their own violent hands.
 Bowers, the accused synagogue killer, echoed Trump talking points when he wrote on the free-speech forum Gab that "I have noticed a change in people saying 'illegals' that now say 'invaders'." The post, made six days before the shooting, continued, "I like this."

The time has come for my Republican "friends" to decide whether they are racists or not.  They cannot support a racist party any longer and then pretend that they are not complicit in its ugly agenda.