Trump's alt-right Poland speech: Time to call his white nationalist rhetoric what it is
SATURDAY, JUL 8, 2017 07:00 AM EDT
Trump’s alt-right Poland speech: Time to call his white nationalist rhetoric what it is
After two years of flirting with overt white nationalism, Trump jumps the alt-right shark in his Warsaw speech
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Donald Trump continued to push forward his white nationalist agenda in Poland on Thursday, in a speech that, as Sarah Wildman at Vox wrote, “often resorted to rhetorical conceits typically used by the European and American alt-right.”
That this is true should hardly be worth debating. Trump argued that Western (read: white) nations are “the fastest and the greatest community” and the “world has never known anything like our community of nations.” He crowed about how Westerners (read: white people) “write symphonies,” “pursue innovation” and “always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers,” as if these were unique qualities to white-dominated nations, instead of universal truths of the human race across all cultures.
He also portrayed this Western civilization as under assault from forces “from the South or the East” that “threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
The speech read, at times, like a cleaned-up version of “The Camp of Saints,” a white supremacist novel that Trump advisor Steve Bannon reportedly admires, which portrays a Western civilization on the verge of invasion by legions of evil dark-skinned people intent on destruction.
The speech wasn’t subtle. Both folks on the left and on the alt-right understood it clearly. Folks on TheDonald forum on Reddit were inspired to post heavily about how immigrants and leftists are destroying Europe and only the hard right can stop the damage. Breitbart gushed about how Trump was calling for “protecting our borders” and “preserving Western civilization,” and bizarrely compared the speech to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, even though the Berlin Wall is the gold standard in the kind of border security and cultural “preservation” that Trump has made his political career calling for.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/07/08/trumps-alt-right-poland-speech-time-to-call-his-white-nationalist-rhetoric-what-it-is/