Hillary Is Doing America a Favor by Drawing Attention to Trump's White Supremacist Supporters

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

26 August 16

ome are saying that by singling out the “Alt Right” in her speech yesterday linking Trump to them, she’s giving the world of white nationalists the credibility and attention they've been yearning for – and possibly increasing their numbers.

I disagree.

The fact is, Trump’s campaign has already added fuel to white nationalism -- and he (and they) must be held accountable.

Trump has repeatedly retweeted supportive messages from racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his nine million followers. Last fall, he retweeted a graphic with fictitious crime statistics claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims in 2015 were killed by blacks (the actual figure for 2014 was 15 percent, according to the F.B.I.) Earlier this year he retweeted messages from a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, whose profile picture is of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. A couple of days later, in quick succession, he retweeted two more accounts featuring white nationalist or Nazi themes.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.

By smoking out Trump and exposing the cell pool of white nationalism, Hillary is doing America a favor.

What do you think?