David Duke and most high profile K.K.K. Clansman and former leader endorses Donald Trump. by Abigail Tracy ( Republished with permission of the Author and Vanity Fair in which the article first appeared )
The Republican nominee’s K.K.K. problem isn’t going away. Trump has been asked the question numerous times and still hasn't himself distanced himself from the K.K. K. endorsement.
Donald Trump may not want the support of David Duke, but unfortunately for him, the former Ku Klux Klan leader is giving it. As the Trump campaign battles criticism for its recent, tone-deaf attempts to court black voters and as Republicans desperately fight to maintain control of Congress in a number of key battleground states, the last thing they need is the unrelenting endorsement of the nation’s most prominent white nationalist. But they have it.Trump has and now that he has it is resisting any temptation to walk away from it.
On Sunday, vice presidential nominee Mike Pence condemned Duke’s effusive praise of Trump, after the former klansman said he was “overjoyed” to see the Republican nominee’s campaign “embrace most of the issues that I have championed for years.” In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Pence said Duke’s backing upset him, adding, “We don’t want the support of people who think like David Duke.” and yet again Pence is at odds with his running mate Trump. Trump himself has not yet distanced himself from this huge alt right rolls royce endorsement by the Crusader , the monthly mouthpiece of the K.K.K..
But the former K.K.K. grand wizard was apparently unperturbed by Pence’s disavowal. Instead of distancing himself from the Trump campaign, Duke lent his voice to robocalls that are going out to Louisiana voters, BuzzFeed News reported Monday, urging them to support both his senate bid and Trump for president in November. “Unless massive immigration is stopped now, we’ll be outnumbered and outvoted in our own nation. It’s happening,” Duke says in the robocalls. “Look at the Super Bowl salute to the black Panther cop killers. It’s time to stand up and vote for Donald Trump for president and vote for me, David Duke, for the U.S. Senate.”
The Trump campaign distanced itself from the recording. In a statement to Politico, a spokesperson said: “There is no place for this in the Republican Party or our country. We have knowledge of these calls and related activities, but strongly condemn and disavow.”. The statement however did not come from Trump's headquarters in Trump Towers rather from their little token office in California , A State Hillary Clinton leads by 27% . But Duke’s unsolicited plaudit for Trump comes at an inauspicious time for the campaign. In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has faced a deluge of criticism for its outreach to black voters. Trump’s frank pitch to African-American voters—“What the hell do you have to lose?”—was condemned for relying heavily on stereotypes of the African-American community. Over the weekend, the Republican standard bearer faced a fresh wave of backlash for his use of Dwyane Wade’s cousin’s death in a callous tweet to encourage votes in his favor.
The Trump campaign’s Duke headaches, however, date back well before it decided to ramp up its efforts to reach black voters. The presidential hopeful was slow to disavow the K.K.K. leader’s endorsement of his candidacy earlier this year and still hasn't done so conclusively. And while Trump did later say that he didn’t need Duke’s endorsement, but welcomed all endorsements, the damage was done. Since then, his campaign has struggled to distance itself from Duke and the white-supremacist movement—a battle it is not alone in fighting. The Republican Party of Louisiana is trying to prevent Duke from running as a member of the Party of Lincoln in the future, the Daily Beast reports. “David Duke is a convicted felon and a hate-filled fraud who does not embody the values of the Republican Party,” Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger F. Villere Jr., said in a statement. G.O.P. lawmakers in the state reportedly hope to change Louisiana’s bylaws to prevent convicted felons and individuals with links to hate groups from running for public office.
Duke’s fervent support for Trump, meanwhile, is a boon for Hillary Clinton, whose latest strategy involves linking her Republican opponent to the most hateful voices among his right-wing base. In a speech last week, Clinton excoriated the billionaire for hiring Stephen Bannon, a former Breitbart News executive, as his campaign C.E.O., and accused Trump of “reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.” That same day, the Democratic nominee also released a campaign ad rife with racially charged imagery and a man identified as a klansman explaining why he supports Trump. The Republican’s campaign reacted with outrage, but white nationalists who saw the speech were thrilled to get the recognition. Duke, despite being spurned, is apparently still a Trump supporter, too.
David Duke and most high profile K.K.K. Clansman and former leader endorses Donald Trump. by Abigail Tracy ( Republished with permission of the Author and Vanity Fair in which the article first appeared )
The Republican nominee’s K.K.K. problem isn’t going away. Trump has been asked the question numerous times and still hasn't himself distanced himself from the K.K. K. endorsement.
Donald Trump may not want the support of David Duke, but unfortunately for him, the former Ku Klux Klan leader is giving it. As the Trump campaign battles criticism for its recent, tone-deaf attempts to court black voters and as Republicans desperately fight to maintain control of Congress in a number of key battleground states, the last thing they need is the unrelenting endorsement of the nation’s most prominent white nationalist. But they have it.Trump has and now that he has it is resisting any temptation to walk away from it.
On Sunday, vice presidential nominee Mike Pence condemned Duke’s effusive praise of Trump, after the former klansman said he was “overjoyed” to see the Republican nominee’s campaign “embrace most of the issues that I have championed for years.” In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Pence said Duke’s backing upset him, adding, “We don’t want the support of people who think like David Duke.” and yet again Pence is at odds with his running mate Trump. Trump himself has not yet distanced himself from this huge alt right rolls royce endorsement by the Crusader , the monthly mouthpiece of the K.K.K..
But the former K.K.K. grand wizard was apparently unperturbed by Pence’s disavowal. Instead of distancing himself from the Trump campaign, Duke lent his voice to robocalls that are going out to Louisiana voters, BuzzFeed News reported Monday, urging them to support both his senate bid and Trump for president in November. “Unless massive immigration is stopped now, we’ll be outnumbered and outvoted in our own nation. It’s happening,” Duke says in the robocalls. “Look at the Super Bowl salute to the black Panther cop killers. It’s time to stand up and vote for Donald Trump for president and vote for me, David Duke, for the U.S. Senate.”
The Trump campaign distanced itself from the recording. In a statement to Politico, a spokesperson said: “There is no place for this in the Republican Party or our country. We have knowledge of these calls and related activities, but strongly condemn and disavow.”. The statement however did not come from Trump's headquarters in Trump Towers rather from their little token office in California , A State Hillary Clinton leads by 27% . But Duke’s unsolicited plaudit for Trump comes at an inauspicious time for the campaign. In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has faced a deluge of criticism for its outreach to black voters. Trump’s frank pitch to African-American voters—“What the hell do you have to lose?”—was condemned for relying heavily on stereotypes of the African-American community. Over the weekend, the Republican standard bearer faced a fresh wave of backlash for his use of Dwyane Wade’s cousin’s death in a callous tweet to encourage votes in his favor.
The Trump campaign’s Duke headaches, however, date back well before it decided to ramp up its efforts to reach black voters. The presidential hopeful was slow to disavow the K.K.K. leader’s endorsement of his candidacy earlier this year and still hasn't done so conclusively. And while Trump did later say that he didn’t need Duke’s endorsement, but welcomed all endorsements, the damage was done. Since then, his campaign has struggled to distance itself from Duke and the white-supremacist movement—a battle it is not alone in fighting. The Republican Party of Louisiana is trying to prevent Duke from running as a member of the Party of Lincoln in the future, the Daily Beast reports. “David Duke is a convicted felon and a hate-filled fraud who does not embody the values of the Republican Party,” Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger F. Villere Jr., said in a statement. G.O.P. lawmakers in the state reportedly hope to change Louisiana’s bylaws to prevent convicted felons and individuals with links to hate groups from running for public office.
Duke’s fervent support for Trump, meanwhile, is a boon for Hillary Clinton, whose latest strategy involves linking her Republican opponent to the most hateful voices among his right-wing base. In a speech last week, Clinton excoriated the billionaire for hiring Stephen Bannon, a former Breitbart News executive, as his campaign C.E.O., and accused Trump of “reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.” That same day, the Democratic nominee also released a campaign ad rife with racially charged imagery and a man identified as a klansman explaining why he supports Trump. The Republican’s campaign reacted with outrage, but white nationalists who saw the speech were thrilled to get the recognition. Duke, despite being spurned, is apparently still a Trump supporter, too.
DAVID DUKE MISSED THE MEMO THAT TRUMP DOESN’T WANT HIS SUPPORT by Abigail Tracy ( Republished with permission of the Author and Vanity Fair in which the article first appeared )
The Republican nominee’s K.K.K. problem isn’t going away. Trump has been asked the question numerous times and still hasn't himself distanced himself from the K.K. K. endorsement.
Donald Trump may not want the support of David Duke, but unfortunately for him, the former Ku Klux Klan leader is giving it. As the Trump campaign battles criticism for its recent, tone-deaf attempts to court black voters and as Republicans desperately fight to maintain control of Congress in a number of key battleground states, the last thing they need is the unrelenting endorsement of the nation’s most prominent white nationalist. But they have it.Trump has and now that he has it is resisting any temptation to walk away from it.
On Sunday, vice presidential nominee Mike Pence condemned Duke’s effusive praise of Trump, after the former klansman said he was “overjoyed” to see the Republican nominee’s campaign “embrace most of the issues that I have championed for years.” In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Pence said Duke’s backing upset him, adding, “We don’t want the support of people who think like David Duke.” and yet again Pence is at olds with his running mate Trump. Trump himself has not yet distanced himself from this huge alt right rolls royce endorsement.
But the former K.K.K. grand wizard was apparently unperturbed by Pence’s disavowal. Instead of distancing himself from the Trump campaign, Duke lent his voice to robocalls that are going out to Louisiana voters, BuzzFeed News reported Monday, urging them to support both his senate bid and Trump for president in November. “Unless massive immigration is stopped now, we’ll be outnumbered and outvoted in our own nation. It’s happening,” Duke says in the robocalls. “Look at the Super Bowl salute to the black Panther cop killers. It’s time to stand up and vote for Donald Trump for president and vote for me, David Duke, for the U.S. Senate.”
The Trump campaign distanced itself from the recording. In a statement to Politico, a spokesperson said: “There is no place for this in the Republican Party or our country. We have knowledge of these calls and related activities, but strongly condemn and disavow.”. The statement however did not come from Trump's headquarters in Trump Towers rather from their little token office in California , A State Hillary Clinton leads by 27% . But Duke’s unsolicited plaudit for Trump comes at an inauspicious time for the campaign. In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has faced a deluge of criticism for its outreach to black voters. Trump’s frank pitch to African-American voters—“What the hell do you have to lose?”—was condemned for relying heavily on stereotypes of the African-American community. Over the weekend, the Republican standard bearer faced a fresh wave of backlash for his use of Dwyane Wade’s cousin’s death in a callous tweet to encourage votes in his favor.
The Trump campaign’s Duke headaches, however, date back well before it decided to ramp up its efforts to reach black voters. The presidential hopeful was slow to disavow the K.K.K. leader’s endorsement of his candidacy earlier this year and still hasn't done so conclusively. And while Trump did later say that he didn’t need Duke’s endorsement, but welcomed all endorsements, the damage was done. Since then, his campaign has struggled to distance itself from Duke and the white-supremacist movement—a battle it is not alone in fighting. The Republican Party of Louisiana is trying to prevent Duke from running as a member of the Party of Lincoln in the future, the Daily Beast reports. “David Duke is a convicted felon and a hate-filled fraud who does not embody the values of the Republican Party,” Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger F. Villere Jr., said in a statement. G.O.P. lawmakers in the state reportedly hope to change Louisiana’s bylaws to prevent convicted felons and individuals with links to hate groups from running for public office.
Duke’s fervent support for Trump, meanwhile, is a boon for Hillary Clinton, whose latest strategy involves linking her Republican opponent to the most hateful voices among his right-wing base. In a speech last week, Clinton excoriated the billionaire for hiring Stephen Bannon, a former Breitbart News executive, as his campaign C.E.O., and accused Trump of “reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.” That same day, the Democratic nominee also released a campaign ad rife with racially charged imagery and a man identified as a klansman explaining why he supports Trump. The Republican’s campaign reacted with outrage, but white nationalists who saw the speech were thrilled to get the recognition. Duke, despite being spurned, is apparently still a Trump supporter, too.
Pursue a left-wing agenda around the political race track long enough and you’ll meet a right-wing agenda sprinting at you from the other direction.
In the twentieth century Nazism and Bolshevism stood at opposite extremes of the political spectrum and their philosophies were poles apart, yet their regimes bore remarkable similarities to each other: the smothering of dissension, the persecution of political opponents, insistence that the state was more important than the individual, total disregard for the rule of law, rejection of religion, and so on.
Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Britain finds itself witness to an extraordinary situation in which the hard left leadership of the main opposition party – the Labour Party – has been revealed as harbouring extreme forms of anti-Semitism, the defining policy of fascists world-wide.
The current scandal, which has resulted in the suspension of two prominent Labour figures and a number of minor ones, and the setting up of an independent enquiry into anti-Semitism in the party, was sparked off in February. When the Oxford University Labour Club – the largest student Labour group in the country – voted to endorse Israel Apartheid Week, the co-chair resigned, asserting that the club was riven with anti-Semitism.
“Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around the term 'Zio' (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their 'solidarity' with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that 'most accusations of antisemitism are just the Zionists crying wolf’, a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.This whistle-blowing statement was unusual, if not unique, in bringing to the surface the monster that had been lurking in left-wing waters for a very long time – a monster obvious to those outside the charmed left-wing enclave, but never acknowledged within it.
Following the pattern of such events, one revelation was soon followed by others, and the scandal mushroomed. The MP for Bradford, Naseem Shah, suddenly found anti-Semitic Facebook comments she had posted in 2014, before she was elected, splashed across the media. After a deal of humming and hawing, Labour’s extreme left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, agreed to her suspension from the party. She subsequently made a full apology to the House of Commons for proposing that all Israelis should be deported to the United States.
The next bizarre twist came when Ken Livingstone, London’s former mayor and a close colleague of the Labour leader, took to the airwaves in vociferous support of Naseem Shah. His defence included a series of bizarre, not to say irrelevant, remarks linking Hitler to Zionism, as if an early and short-lived Nazi plan to permit German Jews to emigrate to Palestine somehow made Hitler an advocate of Jewish national independence. Livingstone’s remarks seemed to many designed to link Zionism with Nazism, and the subsequent media furore was intense. After a period of havering, Corbyn thrust Livingstone, too, into the outer darkness.
The indecisiveness that marked Corbyn’s response to these episodes directed the spotlight also on him and his record of consorting with anti-Israel and Jew-hating terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. There is no evidence that he himself is anti-Semitic, and much that he is passionately anti-racist, but he seems utterly purblind to the implications of consorting openly with individuals and organizations dedicated to killing Jews whoever they are, or wherever they can be found, inside or outside Israel.
Leading UK journalist, Charles Moore, has noted that Jeremy Corbyn refuses to share a platform with Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, over the EU referendum, although both favour remaining in the EU. Mr Corbyn’s stated reason is that “We are not on the same side”.
But, as Moore points out, Corbyn has shared a platform with – among many other such – Sheikh Raed Saleh, who (elsewhere) repeated the “blood libel” against the Jews, and called them “monkeys” and “bacteria”; with representatives of the British Muslim Initiative, which plays the anti-Semitic card of comparing Jews with Nazis with its “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” placards; and with what he calls his “friends” from Hamas”, an organization whose Charter positively encourages the killing of Jews.
Moore observes that Naseem Shah and Ken Livingstone must feel bewildered by the condemnation heaped upon them, because they inhabit a party whose leader has, over his 40 years in politics, spent hundreds of hours sharing platforms with virtually every sort of Muslim anti-Semite and advocate of terrorism that one can imagine. They may, he conjectures, have thought they had permission.
When did it all start? Perhaps after the 6-Day War, in June 1967. The enormous territorial gains made by Israel in that short week resulted in millions of Palestinians coming under Israeli governance – but also in the consequential demand for independence from it.
Until ‘67, Jews and Israel had usually been well regarded by the Left in Britain. They were perceived as allies in the fight against fascism. Now this changed. Left-wing groups started to become militant about the Palestinian cause. As the ideology spread, it morphed into an all-encompassing narrative of dispossession and oppression, a burning grievance against the West in general and Israel in particular.
Left-wingers like Corbyn have never endorsed the more extreme tenets of Islamism, but neither have they confronted them. To have done so would have been to betray their sacred anti-colonialist beliefs. As for the charge of anti-Semitism, in their minds it is, like all other forms of racism, a hallmark of fascism. They are anti-fascists, so they simply can’t be racists.
As Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Mark Regev, remarked, to say “anti-Semitism, that’s the Right, that’s the fascists,” is a cop-out. “Part of the Left,” he said, “is in denial.”
In short, in Britain today Marxism and Fascism are shaking hands, and the left-wing leadership of the Labour party is in disarray.
