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Comment by rjtavares | Hacker News Reader

Except Trump constantly winks at white supremacists and actively seeks their vote.

> Except Trump constantly winks at white supremacists and actively seeks their vote.

This argument has never made any sense. White supremacists are concentrated in states that Republicans win by such large margins that victory is assured regardless of how the minority sporting swastika tattoos votes.

His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has strong ties to white supremacy, and back in 1986 was considered by both sides of the political aisle to be too racist to be a federal judge. Sessions has a record doing such wonderful things as suing voting rights activists for trying to register black voters[1], and joking that the worst thing about the KKK is their marijuana-smoking members.

So tell me: what kind of President would select a guy like this as his Attorney General?

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/magazine/the-voter-fraud-...

Cf. Reverend Wright?

If this weekend has taught us anything it's that most white supremacists aren't rednecks from the deep south with swastika tattoos. A lot of the are perfectly normal looking, university educated young men living in nice suburbs all across the country.

What did you possibly think before?

That bad people fit the cartoonish representation pushed by tag team of media and stereotyping?

Given the post I was replying to it seemed important to reiterate this fact.

Proof?

Trump's Twitter retweet, literally last night. He retweeted a racist dogwhistle from an Alt Right personality hours after Trump supposedly condemned them.

For those of us who don't follow his every twitter move, which tweet are you referring to?

He retweeted this last night: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/897107711434915842

That's racist? How is pointing out an ongoing bloodbath in Chicago, where most victims are not well-to-do fellow "white supremists", racist? To be fair you have to admit Trump has a lot more on his mind than just one white supremacist rally and he's been trying to get involved in Chicago's violence since before the election.

The content of the tweet is noise, it's the source of the tweet that is the signal and the message re-tweeting a tweet from that source sends.

There is a big difference between ongoing gang violence and a terrorist attack. They are both problems, yes, but a terrorist attack by a Nazi during a public demonstration is by far bigger news.

Yeah it's called a dog whistle. A white supremacist killed a woman in Charlottesville last weekend, but look what black people did in Chicago.

He hasn't been trying to get involved, he's done fuck all except tweet about it and use it as a dog whistle to talk about how insane those blacks in Chicago are at his bizarre post-election rallies.

But he has a black friend who will fix Chicago violence in a week!!

That's classic whataboutism and incorrect as well. There's been plenty of media coverage about the Chicago gang violence (and other inner city gang violence) over the years. Political protests, as well as terrorist acts, do tend to receive more intense coverage than ongoing systematic violence.

I don't know about this Twitter account, but I do personally consider it racist when reporting or discussions are angled to only report ethnic group targets (or other tribes) negatively. Whataboutism like this is also a signal to me.

White supremacists feel winked at, isn't that enough?

http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-spencer-says-trump-di...

Also, if you are not familiar with "white nationalism" or Richard Spencer, this interview should help: https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/a-frank-conversation-wit...

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