How Donald Trump is breathing life into America’s dying white supremacist movement.
Making friends is no easy task for modern white nationalists.
In an era of gay marriage and a black president, more than a half-century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, separatists can’t exactly swan dive into conversations with strangers about the white-power cause.
But Rachel Pendergraft — the national organizer for the Knights Party, a standard-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan — told The Washington Post that the KKK, for one, has a new conversation starter at its disposal.
You might call it a “Trump card.”
It involves, say, walking into a coffee shop or sitting on a train while carrying a newspaper with a Donald Trump headline. The Republican presidential candidate, Pendergraft told The Post, has become a great outreach tool, providing separatists with an easy way to start a conversation about issues that are important to the dying white supremacist movement.
“One of the things that our organization really stresses with our membership is we want them to educate themselves on issues, but we also want them to be able to learn how to open up a conversation with other people,” Pendergraft said.
Using Trump as a conversation piece has been discussed on a private, members-only website and in “e-news, stuff that goes out to members.”
In addition to opening “a door to conversation,” she said, Trump’s surging candidacy has done something else: It has electrified some members of the movement.
“They like the overall momentum of his rallies and his campaign,” Pendergraft said. “They like that he’s not willing to back down. He says what he believes and he stands on that.”
For large numbers of Americans, Trump’s rhetoric surrounding immigration, minority groups and crime may sound like finely tuned retrograde vitriol. But for Pendergraft and a growing number of white nationalists flocking to the campaign’s circus-like tent, the billionaire sounds familiar, like a man fluent in the native tongue of disaffected whites.
It’s a language people such as Pendergraft never thought they’d hear a mainstream politician in either party use in public.
Much More: How Donald Trump is breathing life into America’s dying white supremacist movement
Trump has given white racists new life and energy. Sane people can only hope he never becomes president.
Making friends is no easy task for modern white nationalists.
In an era of gay marriage and a black president, more than a half-century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, separatists can’t exactly swan dive into conversations with strangers about the white-power cause.
But Rachel Pendergraft — the national organizer for the Knights Party, a standard-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan — told The Washington Post that the KKK, for one, has a new conversation starter at its disposal.
You might call it a “Trump card.”
It involves, say, walking into a coffee shop or sitting on a train while carrying a newspaper with a Donald Trump headline. The Republican presidential candidate, Pendergraft told The Post, has become a great outreach tool, providing separatists with an easy way to start a conversation about issues that are important to the dying white supremacist movement.
“One of the things that our organization really stresses with our membership is we want them to educate themselves on issues, but we also want them to be able to learn how to open up a conversation with other people,” Pendergraft said.
Using Trump as a conversation piece has been discussed on a private, members-only website and in “e-news, stuff that goes out to members.”
In addition to opening “a door to conversation,” she said, Trump’s surging candidacy has done something else: It has electrified some members of the movement.
“They like the overall momentum of his rallies and his campaign,” Pendergraft said. “They like that he’s not willing to back down. He says what he believes and he stands on that.”
For large numbers of Americans, Trump’s rhetoric surrounding immigration, minority groups and crime may sound like finely tuned retrograde vitriol. But for Pendergraft and a growing number of white nationalists flocking to the campaign’s circus-like tent, the billionaire sounds familiar, like a man fluent in the native tongue of disaffected whites.
It’s a language people such as Pendergraft never thought they’d hear a mainstream politician in either party use in public.
Much More: How Donald Trump is breathing life into America’s dying white supremacist movement
Trump has given white racists new life and energy. Sane people can only hope he never becomes president.
