Inconvenient and Ugly Truths about Billy Graham

Some say that it is bad form to speak ill of the dead.  I view it as even worse form, however, to rewrite history and avoid the truth about public figures, especially when the truth involves bigotry and self-enrichment.  While much of the mainstream media is engaged something akin to self-felatio in mourning over the death of Billy Graham - I omit the designation "Reverend" since I hold bible colleges and the Southern Baptist Convention in very low esteem - very little is being said about the ugly side of Graham who was a homophobe, a make chauvinist, and an anti-Semite.  Yes, unlike most Southern Baptists of his era, Graham disavowed outright segregation, but that hardly merits forgiving his other transgressions  against decency.    It also bears remembering that Graham set the model for today's self-enriching scamvangelists - i.e., so called pastors and evangelists who laugh all the way to the bank - and played a role in evangelical Christians' toxic role in American politics.   A piece in The Raw Story looks at the ugly underbelly of Graham's "career."   Here are excerpts:

Graham is getting tributes from all corners right now. And he deserves praise for supporting the civil rights movement, supporting Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment and embracing Muhammad Ali during the fall-out of his conversion to Islam. All those good deeds will be covered in great detail today.

But while Graham certainly did many great things, he also said and did some awful things. And because he was so respected, his deeds were very influential.

Graham helped normalize ultra-rich pastors. Graham’s wealth, and focus on more wealth, was modest compared to the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel today. His net worth was estimated at $25 million.

Graham once preached that AIDS was the judgement of God. “Is AIDS a judgment of God? . . . Graham quickly backtracked on this one, saying that he didn’t believe that and didn’t know why he said it. Nevertheless, this dog-whistle was heard by too many.

Graham wrote a memo to President Nixon urging him to commit a war crime in Vietnam. Unlike many Christian leaders, Graham supported a very specific military strategy in the Vietnam war. He wanted Nixon to use nuclear weapons to destroy the dikes that manage flooding in North Vietnam. This plan was something Henry Kissinger dismissed as “just too much.”

Graham was anti-Semitic. . . . . For example, after taped conversations revealed that Graham made anti-Semitic statements to President Nixon. Specifically, he told the president that Jews control the media, and that this was dangerous: “This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.” Nixon agreed with this, and Graham suggested that if he got elected to a second term “we might be able to do something.” Graham would later point out that he had Jewish friends.
 Graham had backward views on women. He criticized feminism, and is the namesake of that weird rule that Mike Pence lives by, never spending any time alone with any woman besides his wife.
 Graham raised his boy wrong. In his 1997 autobiography, Graham was regretful of his involvement in politics, writing that, “If I had to do it all over again, I would also avoid any semblance of involvement in partisan politics… And yet, Graham failed to impart this wisdom on his son Franklin Graham, who took over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and who has taken the lead in defending and legitimizing Donald Trump to evangelicals.

The comment in the piece about Graham's son is an understatement as to the lengths Franklin Graham has thrown aside supposed "Christian" values in supporting Trump, Roy Moore and other morally bankrupt Republicans.  His sister Ann Graham Lotz is no better and fully fits the scamvangelist model established by her father who made being a "professional Christian" a route to personal financial wealth.  Graham and his children excelled at claiming the Bible inerrant yet ignored any passages not supportive of their personal and political agendas. 

One of Billy Graham's last public acts was in 2012 - possible under his son's coercion - when he was trotted out to endorse North Carolina's Amendment 1 that banned marriage equality.  As a piece in Huffington Post by an activist friend notes, Graham's statement appeared in full page ads in 14 newspapers across North Carolina.  Graham was no friend to the LGBT community and he was no supporter of equality under the law. 

Recommitting to Resisting Trump and All He Represents

With the holiday season upon us and "peace on earth and good will toward mankind" purportedly in the minds of most citizens, it is time to recommit to those values.  It is also time to recommit to resisting those who are anathema to such values.  In particular, it means recommitting to resisting the toxicity and indecency of the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers and hate filled, Pharisee like evangelical Christian supporters.  A column in the New York Times looks at this need for re-commitment and reminds us of all that is abhorrent about the Trump/Pence regime.  Here are column highlights: 

Last Thanksgiving I wrote a column titled, “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” in which I committed myself to resisting this travesty of a man, proclaiming, “I have not only an ethical and professional duty to call out how obscene your very existence is at the top of American government; I have a moral obligation to do so.”

I made this promise: “As long as there are ink and pixels, you will be the focus of my withering gaze.”  I have kept that promise, not because it was a personal challenge, but because this is a national crisis.

Donald Trump, I thought that your presidency would be a disaster. It’s worse than a disaster. I wasn’t sure that resistance to your weakening of the republic, your coarsening of the culture, your assault on truth and honesty, your erosion of our protocols, would feel as urgent today as it felt last year. But if anything, that resistance now feels more urgent.

Nothing about you has changed for the better. You are still a sexist, bigoted, bullying, self-important simpleton. But now all of the worst of you has the force of the American presidency.

The legitimacy of your presidency is in question. The corruption of your administration is not. You are a national stain and an international embarrassment. You are anti-intellectual and pro-impulse. The same fingers with which you compulsively tweet are dangerously close to the nuclear codes. You are historically unpopular and history will not be kind to you. It is all so dizzyingly distressing.

But what irks me most is your targeted attacks on historically marginalized populations as a political ploy to secure the support of the racists, misogynists and homophobes. . . . Your hostility toward minorities and your courting and coddling of the people who hate them has become a standard practice of your presidency.

We see it in the way that you attack N.F.L. players protesting police violence, while you encourage police officers to be more violent. We see this in the way that your Justice Department is moving to return to rigid, racially skewed drug policies that helped to fuel our unconscionable level of mass incarceration, a phenomenon Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow,” while also returning to a reliance on private prisons.

We see this in the devastating contrast between the ways you have talked about and treated hurricane victims in Texas versus in Puerto Rico.

Trump is clearly, blatantly, virulently hostile to people who are not white and non-Christian. That is not a statement of opinion, but a statement of demonstrated fact.

[I]t is Trump who is proving to be a threat to the L.G.B.T. community, particularly to transgender Americans, with his ban on trans people in the military, his rescinding of federal protections for trans students, and his Justice Department’s reversal of a policy protecting trans workers.

[T]he “Access Hollywood” tape was released on which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. And women came out in droves to personally accuse him of sexually inappropriate behavior, the kinds of accusations that people are now losing jobs over.
To add insult to injury, Trump the Groper has just thrown the weight and word of the presidency behind Roy Moore the Alleged Pedophile, choosing the claim of a single horrible man, even aside from the allegations, over nine women who seem to have nothing to gain by coming forward. Trump not only doesn’t respect women, he doesn’t even hear women.

This man is a pathological liar. He commends and conforms to anyone who pretends to love him, whether they are Russians or racists. He is inherently a patriarchal white supremacist and it seeps out in all sorts of ways, but it is most pronounced in the way that he attacks people who are not white and male. 

When you accept those truths, everything else makes sense. But accepting the truth is not the same as accepting the liar. Trump is unacceptable in every possible way, and must continue to be met at every turn with the strong arm of defiance. That is why today I recommit myself to resistance, and so should you.

And lest we forget the full Trump/Pence?GOP agenda, a second column reminds of the hideous aspects of that agenda.  Here's a short excerpt:

Meanwhile, everything this president and this Congress are doing on economic policy seems designed, not just to widen the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, but to lock in plutocrats’ advantages, making it easier to ensure that their heirs remain on top and the rest stay down.

It’s unclear whether the terrible tax bills being advanced by Trump and his allies will go through Congress; but environmental policy is largely set by administrative action, and this administration has been moving with stunning speed to get poisons back into our air and water. Not to mention the growing odds of climate catastrophe.

White supremacists are, of course, making a big comeback thanks to encouragement from the top. (They are, after all, “very fine people.”) So are anti-Semites, which is really no surprise to those who remember their history.

Even as old prejudices return, we’ve clearly entered a new age of politically potent anti-intellectualism. America built its world pre-eminence largely on the strength of its educational system. But according to Pew, 58 percent of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, versus only 36 percent who see a positive effect.

And I don’t believe for a minute that this turn against education is a reaction to political correctness. It’s about the nasty habit scholarship has of telling you things you don’t want to hear, like the fact that climate change is real.

Finally, we’re now ruled by people who have no interest in letting hard thinking get in the way of whatever policies they want to follow. 

Did Trump Suggest Anti-Semitic Incidents Could Be Perpetrated by Jews?

In his address before Congress, Der Trumpenführer spoke out one side of his mouth and condemned a growing wave of anti-Semitic attacks on schools and synagogues.  Meanwhile,   Haaretz is reporting that Trump told a gathering of state Attorney Generals that the current wave of anti-Semitic incidents could be “false flags” – perpetrated by the left or by Jews themselves in order to make his administration and supporters look bad.  That's right, Der Trumpenführer, is blaming Jews and liberals for attacks rather than his white supremacist base that has been emboldened by his racist demagoguery.  Here are story highlights:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday indicated for the second time that he believes it is possible that the current wave of anti-Semitic incidents could be “false flags” – perpetrated by the left or by Jews themselves in order to make his administration and supporters look bad.

Trump spoke to a gathering of state attorneys general from across the country that included Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Shapiro told reporters in a conference call after the meeting that Trump suggested that the attacks could reflect something other than anti-Semitism, saying that “the reverse can be true” and “someone’s doing it to make others look bad,” according to Philly.com.

The suggestion that the wave of attacks are false flags meant to perpetuate the impression that they were being committed by Trump supporters has been a theme on right-wing conspiracy theory websites and is being promoted aggressively by white supremacist David Duke on his Twitter account. Trump supporter and informal adviser Anthony Scaramucci tweeted a similar suggestion on Tuesday.

At a press conference on February 16, Trump suggested a false flag conspiracy was being perpetrated by his “opponents” in order to bolster claims that his election and presidency was fueling racism and anti-Semitism. “You have some of the signs and some of that anger caused by the other side,” charged Trump. “They’ll do signs and drawing that are inappropriate. It won’t be my people. It will be people on the other side to anger people like you,” he said.

In response to the reports, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League told Buzzfeed: "We are astonished by what the President reportedly said. It is incumbent upon the White House to immediately clarify these remarks."

Let be candid.  Trump is a liart of the worst type.  If his lips are moving, odds are at 8 out of 10 that he is lying. 

Trump Rolls Out Anti-Semitic Closing Ad

Journalist Julia Ioffe, as hideously re-imagined by
anti-Semitic Trump supporters. Credit: http://www.haaretz.com/  

Donald Trump began his campaign spouting hate and bigotry against Hispanics and now he is closing his campaign with an anti-Semitic ad that plays to the vilest elements of Trump's base.   On our recent cruise, the husband and I met many wonderful, hard working people, most of whom were non-white and many of whom were non-Christians.  In Donald Trump's America, such people are less than human and undeserving of civil rights.  That conservative "Christians" are flocking to Trump's standard shows the moral bankruptcy of than strain of Christianity.   Talking Points Memo looks at Trump's ugly closing effort. Here are highlights:

From a technical and thematic perspective it's a well made ad. It's also packed with anti-Semitic dog whistles, anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Semitic vocabulary. I'm not even sure whether it makes sense to call them dog whistles. The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO).

These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary lined up with high profile Jews as the only Americans other than Clinton who are apparently relevant to the story. As you can see by my transcription, the Jews come up to punctuate specific key phrases. Soros: "those who control the levers of power in Washington"; Yellen "global special interests"; Blankfein "put money into the pockets of handful of large corporations."

This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms 'white hands' ad or the Willie Horton ad were anti-African-American racist ads. Which is to say, really anti-Semitic. You could even argue that it's more so, given certain linguistic similarities with anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s. But it's not a contest. This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas. That's the only standard that really matters.

This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.

Trump has electrified anti-Semites and racist groups across the country. His own campaign has repeatedly found itself speaking to anti-Semites, tweeting their anti-Semitic memes, retweeting anti-Semites. His campaign manager, Steven Bannon, is an anti-Semite. The Breitbart News site he ran and will continue running after the campaign has become increasingly open in the last year with anti-Semitic attacks and politics.

Beyond that, this shouldn't surprise us for a broader reason. Authoritarian, xenophobic political movements, which the Trump campaign unquestionably is, are driven by tribalism and 'us vs them' exclusion of outsiders. This may begin with other groups - Mexican immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims. It almost always comes around to Jews.

It's true there is son-in-law Jared Kushner, a Jew and Ivanka, who converted to Judaism. But this isn't terribly surprising. Kushner appears to be conscienceless. And as I noted here, there is a storied history of anti-Semites being happy to distinguish between good Jews and bad Jews.

There's been a lot of discussion of anti-Semitism and the Trump campaign but a fierce resistance to coming to grips with the fact that anti-Semitism is a key driving force of the Trump campaign, that the campaign itself is an anti-Semitic one even though the great majority of Trump's supporters are not anti-Semites. When he closes out his campaign with a blatantly anti-Semitic ad, it's time to rethink that resistance.

Hitler promised to make Germany Great Again too.  We all know where that led.

How Trump Has Taken Hate Groups Mainstream

rally in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in April 2016 John Bazemore/AP

Being gay causes one, or at least it caused me, to start following anti-gay hate groups almost 20 years ago.  Most wrap themselves in the cloak of "family values" organizations and use the excuse of "deeply held religious belief" to justify stigmatizing others and depriving others of civil rights. Often, those they hate are depicted as less than human and/or a threat to civilization.  One thing I quickly discovered is that if one scratched beneath the "Christian" veneer of these organizations, they also tended to be anti-Semitic and racist. Indeed, in the case of Family Research Council, its president has well documented ties to white supremacy groups and here in Virginia, The Family Foundation membership traces back to those behind the "Massive Resistance" effort that closed Virginia public schools rather than desegregate them.  In this election cycle, Donald Trump has brought both these relgious extremist groups and other hate groups, particularly white supremacy groups and white nationalist groups main stream and made them the core of his support within the GOP.  Amazingly, many Republican friends continue to close their eyes to who they are now in bed with in their support for Trump, America's would be fuhrer.  A lengthy piece in Mother Jones looks at how this happened.  Here are highlights, but one should read the entire piece:

The first warning sign that something new was brewing came in June 2015, as Donald Trump joined the crowded field vying for the Republican presidential nomination. In the extravagant lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, he announced he would build a wall to keep out Mexican criminals and "rapists."

"I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President," wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, 12 days later. Anglin, a 32-year-old skinhead who wears an Aryan "Black Sun"tattoo on his chest and riffs about the inferior "biological nature" of black people, hailed Trump as "the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters."

This neo-Nazi seal of approval initially seemed like an aberration. But two months later, when Trump released his immigration policy, far-right extremists saw a clear signal that Trump understood their core anger and fear about America being taken over by minorities and foreigners. Trump's plan to deport masses of undocumented immigrants and end birthright citizenship was radical and thrilling—"a revolution," in the words of influential white nationalist author Kevin MacDonald, "to restore a White America."

Trump's move was a "game changer," said MacDonald, a 70-year-old silver-haired former academic who edits the Occidental Observer, which the Anti-Defamation League calls "online anti-Semitism's new voice." Trump, he wrote, "is saying what White Americans have been actually thinking for a very long time."

"Stunning," raved Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant site VDare.com. "The thing that delighted us the most," he wrote, was Trump's plan to close "the 'Anchor Baby' loophole," denying citizenship to the American-born children of immigrants—a policy that Brimelow said he had been advocating for more than a decade.

Trump "may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people," remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a white nationalist website calledAmerican Renaissance and once founded a think tank dedicated to "scientifically" proving white superiority. 

Trump fever quickly spread: Other extremists new to presidential politics openly endorsed Trump, including Don Black, a former grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the neo-Nazi site Stormfront; Rocky Suhayda, chair of the American Nazi Party; and Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, the successor to David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Spencer, an emerging leader among a new generation of white nationalists known as the "alt right," declared that Trump "loves white people." 

But Trump did not become the object of white nationalist affection simply because his positions reflect their core concerns. Extremists made him their chosen candidate and now hail him as "Emperor Trump" because he has amplified their message on social media—and, perhaps most importantly, has gone to great lengths to avoid distancing himself from the racist right. With the exception of Duke, Trump has not disavowed a single endorsement from the dozens of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, and militia supporters who have backed him. The GOP nominee, along with his family members, staffers, and surrogates, has instead provided an unprecedented platform for the ideas and rhetoric of far-right extremists, extending their reach. And when challenged on it by the press, Trump has stalled, feigned ignorance, or deflected—but has never specifically rejected any of these other extremists or their ideas.

This stance has thrilled and emboldened hate groups far more than has been generally understood during the 2016 race for the White House. Moreover, Trump's tacit welcoming of these hate groups into mainstream American politics will have long-lasting consequences, according to these groups' own leaders, regardless of the election outcome.

A three-month investigation by Mother Jones and the Investigative Fund—including interviews with white nationalist leaders and an analysis of social-media networks, nearly 100 hours of fringe talk radio, and dozens of posts on influential hate sites—reveals that what has largely been portrayed by the media as Trump "gaffes" has instead been understood by far-right extremists as a warm embrace by Trump. Extremists' zeal for Trump only grew with his decision in August to hire a new campaign chief, Stephen Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart News and a big booster himself of far-right rhetoric. 

In early October, when bombshell archival video revealed Trump bragging about sexual assault and plunged his campaign and the GOP into chaos, that only further energized his extremist supporters. "Girls really don't mind guys that like pussies," influential alt-right video blogger RamZPaul said. "They just hate guys who are pussies."

"The people believe Trump won the debate," Anglin posted. "It's really just an objective fact. Not sure how even liberal kikes could claim otherwise."

To understand how Trump's unspoken alliance with the far right has really worked, take one instance that caused a fleeting uproar last November, when Trump retweeted a graphic falsely claiming that black people were responsible for 81 percent of white homicides. Its source was a white supremacist Twitter feed whose logo is a modified swastika. Politifact and others quickly documented how "wildly inaccurate" the racist graphic was.

After a quick round of fact-checking and rebuke, however, the media moved on. But white nationalist news sites and radio programs were transfixed.  . . . . Trump had done the politically unthinkable—and then he doubled down, declining to delete the tweet (which remains live as of this publication) and asking rhetorically on Fox News, "Am I gonna check every statistic?" Even when Bill O'Reilly urged him, "Don't put your name on stuff like this," Trump didn't back down, saying, "It came from sources that are very credible, what can I tell you."

At various turns in the campaign, Trump has faced questions from the media about his seeming dalliance with the far right, from his selection of a white nationalist party leader as a Republican National Convention delegate, to his retweet of the handle @whitegenocideTM (which was later suspended by Twitter).  . . . . But Trump didn't back down—greatly impressing the men who had voiced the calls, Jared Taylor and American Freedom Party leader William Johnson. Interviewed on Political Cesspool, Taylor said, "For days everybody was calling him up, calling up his campaign, saying, 'What do you think of these horrible people? Denounce them, denounce them.' And he didn't. He maintained a dignified silence."

Moreover, Trump openly sympathized with these white nationalist leaders. 

Just a few weeks later, Trump retweeted a riff disparaging Jeb Bush that had been posted by @WhiteGenocideTM, whose user had previously tweeted out his or her admiration for Hitler. The account @TheNordicNation crowed, "You can say #WhiteGenocide now, Trump has brought it into the mainstream."

Trump's embrace of the far right soon moved beyond the internet. In late February, the Trump campaign granted Edwards media credentials to broadcast from a Trump campaign rally in Tennessee; and days later, Edwards interviewed Donald Trump Jr. on a white nationalist radio show, the Liberty RoundTable. Despite controversy over the interview, Edwards then received credentials for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he interviewed members of Congress and a Trump surrogate for his show.

This courtship burst more fully into view in February, when David Duke told his radio audience that voting against Trump was "really treason to your heritage. "When asked about it by CNN's Jake Tapper, Trump tap-danced around the question, saying he didn't know enough about Duke or the Klan to disavow them. The alt-right viewed Trump's subsequent remarks on MSNBC'sMorning Joe—"David Duke is a bad person who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years"—not as a sign of retreat, but as one of strength. 

The pattern continued throughout the presidential race, from Trump's disparagement of a Mexican American judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University to Trump's retweet of an anti-Semitic image featuring a Star of David and a pile of cash that white nationalists used to smear Hillary Clinton. During the fallout from the latter, Trump went right along with the far right's pushback that the star was simply a sheriff's badge. Trump also refused to condemn the barrage of anti-Semitic attacks on journalist Julia Ioffe after she wrote an unflattering portrait of his wife, Melania Trump.

Donald Trump Jr. has also participated in this dynamic, including with his recent tweet of a meme comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisonous Skittles, which delighted extremists. 

[I]n-depth analysis we conducted of Twitter activity during a week in September shed further light on social-media connections between far-right extremists and the Trump campaign. In consultation with the Southern Poverty Law Center, we compiled a list of hashtags and catchphrases stemming from extremist movements, terms steeped in Holocaust denial, anti-Muslim invective, and other expressions of bigotry and racism. 

Our analysis of the accounts of more than 200 Trump campaign staffers and surrogates revealed that more than two dozen of them were following five or more of the top extremist influencers.

Nancy Mace, Trump's coalitions director for South Carolina, followed 67 extremist influencers in September, including @Rebel_Bill, who regularly posts virulently anti-Semitic riffs and tweeted an image of a transgender woman using a women's bathroom with the words: "Prosecute or lynch."

Trump's South Carolina field director Gerri McDaniel and New Hampshire operative Cynthia Howard each followed @Suthen_boy, who goes by the name Gen. Robert E. Lee and has tweeted about "Black Savages" and declared that "Germans better get over Holocaust guilt or they'll wind up like the Jews only at the hands of muslim vermin."

Geoff Diehl, Trump's Massachusetts field director, followed @LiberalMediaSux, who has tweeted that Islam "condones beastiality and pedophilia" and refers to Muslims as "goat humpers." Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson followed accounts that have declared that "multiculturalism" promotes a program of "genocide against Whites" . . .

Trump surrogates have continued to court the extreme right. In early October, Trump's son Eric and longtime adviser Roger Stone both appeared on the far-right radio program Liberty RoundTable, the one that aired white nationalist James Edwards' interview with Donald Trump Jr. in March. And on October 12, senior Trump adviser A.J. Delgado retweeted a comment from the notoriously anti-Semitic site The Right Stuff, which gave rise to the triple-parentheses "echo" symbol deployed by the alt-right on social media to target Jewish writers.

It all stems from one core issue. "Race is at the foundation of everything to the alt-righters," says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "They have this idea that white people and white civilization are under assault by the forces of political correctness."

The mainstreaming of alt-right ideology by the Trump campaign has also had an invigorating effect on an older generation of white nationalists. . . . . the surviving remnant of Duke's old organization, now being revived by his daughter, Pendergraft, who specializes in white supremacist appeals to women.

Pendergraft, who endorsed Trump last December, said her organization has seen an increase in membership due to Trump. "White people are realizing they are becoming strangers in their own country and they do not have a major political voice speaking for them," she told us. "Trump is one example of the alternative-right candidate Knights Party members and supporters have been looking for. 

He envisions alt-right candidates for school board, city council, and mayor. "I feel my job will be done when at the PTA meeting a woman gets up and says, 'Well of course there aren't as many blacks in the AP courses, because they just do not have the same average IQ,' and nobody objects."

Anglin predicted that if Trump loses, "it is by fraud, and all of these people who are currently supporting him are going to be radicalized." Those radicals, he said, will finally realize "there is a Jewish media conspiracy" and "a war on the White man." Picking up on Trump's own assertion that a Clinton victory would mean the election is "rigged," Anglin said Trump would "order a putsch." . . . If Barack Obama can legitimize gay marriage and transsexuals, Donald Trump can legitimize the Alt-Right."

These people are horrible and dangerous.  Growing up, my mother admonished me and my siblings to be careful who we associated with since it could label us in a negative way.  It is time decent Republicans realize that the GOP has become a cesspool and leave it.  It is no longer the party of my parents and grandparents.  It has become something hideous and Trump has mainstreamed the hate and ugliness.