A former adviser to President George W. Bush is accusing the following Republican leader, President Donald Trump, of creating a culture of racism in America — as captured by a single photograph.
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Describing a photograph in which members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front stood around a seemingly terrified African American woman on a bus in Washington DC during the 4th of July, former Republican political strategist Steve Schmidt described the image as “chilling.”
“A young Black woman sits alone in the center of the frame. Around her stand scores of Nazis dressed in matching uniforms, their faces concealed, filling the railcar,” Schmidt wrote. “The image doesn’t merely document a moment. It indicts an era. The symbolism could hardly be more grotesque. On the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, while fighter jets roared overhead celebrating American liberty, a Black American rode a train surrounded by masked Nazis in the nation’s capital.”
He encouraged readers to study the woman’s face to ask what they see before saying that in her face “most of all, I see the loneliness that accompanies courage.”
After reviewing the history of America’s civil rights movements, Schmidt argued that “Donald Trump didn’t invent America’s oldest prejudices. He exploited them. He legitimized them. He rewarded them. He transformed grievance into political identity and extremism into social permission. That’s his legacy. This photograph is evidence of it.”
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Schmidt concluded, “Don’t let anyone tell you this has nothing to do with MAGA. Don’t let anyone insist this is some isolated phenomenon detached from the political movement that has flourished over the last decade. Political movements are measured not only by the speeches they deliver, but by the culture they create, the conduct they normalize, and the people they embolden.”
Trump is also losing support among white nationalists, some of whom feel stabbed in the back over the president breaking his “no new wars” promise. White nationalists, meanwhile, are struggling with the ongoing perception that they are stupid.
“White nationalism … is getting dumber,” writes reporter Surya Gowda from the conservative publication The Dispatch, who cited as one example the prominent Generation Z neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
“He’s criticized Dan Bilzerian, a podcaster making a congressional bid in Florida on an anti-Israel agenda, for blaming Jews for all the world’s problems despite not knowing ‘anything about anything,’ and has denounced political activist Jake Shields for promoting Adolf Hitler’s supposed benevolence,” Gowda wrote. “Fuentes thinks members of his movement are experiencing a form of “mass psychosis,” in which they are willing to believe every conspiracy theory that exists.”
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