by Alex Emmons
Buoyed by Donald Trump’s election victory, white supremacists
who gathered at a conference Saturday called on him to implement a
50-year moratorium on “non-European immigration.”
Richard Spencer, a leading white nationalist
who heads the supremacist National Policy Institute and claims to have
coined the term “alt-right,” called the proposal “obviously possible,”
and said that “Trump has proven the power of these ideas.”
Spencer described his movement as an “intellectual vanguard that can
complete Trump.” Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of
Muslims entering the United States” in December, but later walked that
proposal back, calling for “extreme vetting” of immigrants from certain
Muslim-majority countries.
In response to a question from The Intercept, Spencer said that
undocumented immigrants and their children “have got to go home. And
they can go home again, they can connect with their real identity.”
When The Intercept followed up by asking about children of undocumented
immigrants who grew up in the U.S., Spencer insisted that even they had a
“real identity” that was other than American. “Reconnecting with who
you really are for a Mexican-American would be about being in Mexico.
For an African, it would be about being in Africa.”
Jared Taylor, a longtime white supremacist author and publisher,
called Muslim immigration a disease. “It’s amazing that these leftists
want this disease coming into society more than they want to protect
themselves,” he said.
Trump’s election has led to an explosion in anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, intimidation and violence. Swasitka graffiti has been reported on billboards, and in parks, public transit, and schools all across the country.
When asked to respond to these incidents, Spencer downplayed the
incidents, saying “I imagine that a lot of those might be hoaxes,” he
said.
He added: “I think we mostly condemn any direct threat of violence.”
White supremacists have seized on Trump’s election to take their
message to the masses. Discussions of how to take that message
“mainstream” dominated Saturday’s event, which was held just blocks from
the White House, and was sponsored by Spencer’s group, the National
Policy Institute — a leading peddler of “academic racism,” according to
the Southern Poverty Law Center.
White nationalist leaders have also celebrated the appointment of Steve Bannon — the executive chairman of Breitbart News — as the White House’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon has boasted that his news site — which spread “birther” conspiracies about President Obama — is a “platform for the alt-right.”
Spencer downplayed any direct connection the group may have to Trump
or Bannon, but he also said that their message will be better received
by a Trump administration. “We have a psychic connection,” said Spencer,
“a deeper connection with Donald Trump than with other Republicans.”
The New York Times reported
that later in the evening, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in German,
and said “America was, until this last generation, a white country
designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our
inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
Throughout the day, a crowd of protestors circled the building, chanting “No Donald Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA.”
Spencer also defended Trump’s “grab-them-by-the-pussy” comments about women, saying “Women, deep down, do
want to be taken by a strong man.” The line met with vigorous applause
from the mostly male audience. The protagonists in romance novels tend
to be physically strong, “like cowboys and vikings,” Spencer said, as
opposed to “boring computer programmers.”
Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-semite described by the Southern Poverty Law Center
as “the Neo-Nazi’s favorite academic,” agreed with Spencer about Trump.
“If he comes on to women, I would say most women would probably like
that.”
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