SUPREMACy: "HAIL TRUMP"
The first electoral debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has ignited white supremacists, extreme right-wing youth and exacerbated racists on social media. Above all, the Republican president was challenged by the Democratic candidate to denounce all of them, after having repeatedly shown his “sympathy and understanding” in the last four years.
Trump pretended not to know whom Joe Biden was referring to, and Biden replied: “The Proud Boys”, the young “puppies”, or not so “puppies”, of the extreme right group more racist, xenophobic and violent of the United States since the time of the Ku Klux Klan. This extreme right that has resurfaced with force and has moved with impunity since Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office of the White House. It was then that Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by”, which has inflamed this neo-Nazi group to interpret the US president’s phrase as words of encouragement; of spirit to confront anti-fascist groups and “people on the left”, that is, the democrats --who for them are “communist-Stalinists”-- and act against any black, Hispanic, immigrant or anyone “suspected” of not having 100% of the Anglo-Saxon and American DNA. Or even against those who, having it, sympathize with the previous groups. Today, Donald Trump continues to deny knowing who the “Proud Boys” are, although he knows them well. What is more; he went on to say last June, during an interview on Fox News, that he is the president of the United States who has done the most for blacks “since Abraham Lincoln”; that is, more than Lyndon Johnson, who ended segregation; more than Harry Truman, who did the same in the military; more than Dwight Eisenhower, who supported racial integration in schools; and more than John Kennedy, who promoted the Civil Rights Act. Republicans for Biden What Trump cannot deny is that Richard B. Spencer, director of the so-called “National Policy Institute”, a Nazi propagandist and anti-Semite, celebrated his coming to power in 2016 with the exclamation “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory” adding a fascist salute. He cannot deny that since then, acts of racist and white supremacist violence, as well as cases of racial discrimination, have multiplied. Furthermore, he cannot deny that even in the Republican Party, former senator Ileana Ros-Lehtinen left politics in 2018, after having served a quarter of a century, because she felt she was a “Republican of the Bush type and not the Trump type”. Nor that thirty prominent Republican politicians, led by former Senators Jeff Flake and John Warner and former New Hampshire Governor Gordon Humphrey, have formed the collective “Republicans for Biden”, which also includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the former congressmen Ray LaHood, Steve Bartlett, Tom Coleman and Mike Parker, among others, because Trump “deteriorates democracy”. Discrimination and brutality He cannot deny that the economic gap between whites and African Americans and Hispanics is seven times larger and the largest since this data was assessed (1963) and that blacks earn 40% less wages than whites for the same jobs, just like half a century ago. Trump cannot deny that human rights experts have urged him to reform the judicial system to end racism, and he has responded by nominating ultra-conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to replace the late progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He cannot deny the deaths of George Floyd, in May, and Jacob Blake, in August, victims of police brutality. Nor the unauthorized surgical sterilizations by hysterectomy of immigrant women, detained at the Irwin County Detention Center, Georgia. |