The Myth Of A Myth: Donald Trump, The Debates, And White Supremacists
Yesterday, in response to the actions of the first Presidential debate, President Trump tweeted the following:
Biden REFUSED to use the term, LAW & ORDER! There go the Suburbs.
First off, Donald Trump, who spent his entire life in New York City, had almost certainly never been in a suburb until he started holding rallies in them.
For that matter, this is a lie. Joe Biden specifically mentioned that he did support “law and order” when Trump asked him about it:
President Donald J. Trump: And you still haven’t mentioned. Are you in favor of law and order?
Vice President Joe Biden: I’m in favor of law. You-.
President Donald J. Trump: Are you in favor of law and order?
Chris Wallace: You asked a question, let him finish. Let him answer.
Vice President Joe Biden: Law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly.
I would assume Donald Trump would know this considering he was present at the debate. However, that’s not what happened, instead Donald Trump lied to the American people about what his opponent said.
In fact, quite possibly one of Biden’s greatest examples of law and order, his 1994 Crime Bill, was only mentioned by Trump as an attack:
DONALD TRUMP: [Biden] did a crime bill, 1994, where you call them super predators. African-Americans are super predators and they’ve never forgotten it. They’ve never forgotten it.
Also, this quote contains a double lie. First off, it was Hillary Clinton, not Joe Biden, who made the infamous “super predators” comment. Although Clinton was talking about the Crime Bill Biden introduced and her husband signed into law.
The quote comes from a 1996 speech, where she stated:
But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs. Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.
She was talking about gangs and drug cartels — the people I was told we needed a wall to stop!
Now none of that should be surprising, however, a certain claim the Trump campaign keeps claiming is a lie has been eating up the news cycle all day. As such, I figured it was only fair I begin by pointing out another lie that had gone under the radar.
During the debate, Donald Trump was asked rather he condemned White Nationalists groups or not. Here’s what he said:
CHRIS WALLACE: You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.
Many assumed Wallace was just talking about Kyle Rittenhouse, however, plans of anti-BLM response riots have been common among certain aspects of the right. Even as recently as 9/25/2020, a number of pro-Trump users on Parler, some of which had ties to the Proud Boys, talked about holding their own protest in Portland, although nobody could call what they planned even mostly peaceful. Here is some of what they said:
Kill everyone in the streets.
Shoot them dead before they kill you! Sick of these terrorist.
Kill on sight.
These little sissies couldn’t handle a 17 year old, why not fight them? Just organize, form armed militias and stand up to them, kill them all, make them fear for their lives, these pathetic soy boys can’t hold the entire country hostage to their whims. This is ridiculous, just shoot them.
Back to the debate:
DONALD TRUMP: Sure, I’m willing to do that.
CHRIS WALLACE: Are you prepared specifically to do it.
DONALD TRUMP: I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing not from the right wing.
Let’s see how true that is: During the riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for example, two people died. Both were killed by Trump supporter and right-wing hero Kyle Rittenhouse — the man who drove one hundred miles to defend himself.
However, Rittenhouse is in the minority of cases — just not in the way the President thinks. When ABC looked into this, they found that most of the crimes committed at these riots were not done by leftists, but by people who had no political agenda at all:
Some of the deaths have allegedly been perpetrated by suspects with their own agendas that do not include social justice, others have allegedly been carried out by agitators seeking to use the protests as cover for their own purposes, including looting and other violent acts. Some may have resulted from personal disputes.
Basically, it was not Black Lives Matter who killed David Dorn, the retired black police chief who was killed in early June, it was people who wanted to loot and saw a protest as an excuse to do so. Believe it or not, people who loot stores do not know the first thing about issues like systematic racism, nor do they care. They just want to steal things because that’s all they know how to do.
However, the fact that the President once again lied to our faces was also not the big scandal, it was the fact that he did not specifically condemn white nationalism.
In order to see how true that is, why not ask a real white nationalist. Here’s what Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer had to say on the debate:
The takeaway from the debate is this: Donald Trump is the greatest person on earth. He shouldn’t be president, he should be king. If he were king, he wouldn’t have to deal with all of the scum in Congress, the scum that runs his government, and he could deal directly with the needs of the people. Several times during the event, Joe Biden would say, “his own government disagrees with him.” And that is of course the key problem. His own government, with scumbags like William Barr, Chad Wolf, Mike Pompeo, Anthony Fauci — they are preventing him from doing the will of the people. The Trump we saw on stage in Cleveland was a true leader of the people, who would crush the enemies of the people if he did not have this filth swarming him.
So I’m not sure the condemnation stuck.
The specific part where Trump officially condemned them, or at least condemned the debatably (I only say for legal reasons) white nationalist group The Proud Boys is here:
DONALD TRUMP: What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name, go ahead who do you want me to condemn.
CHRIS WALLACE: White supremacist and white militia.
DONALD TRUMP: Okay, boys stand back and stand by.
Stand back and stand down? Well, maybe it’s just weird phrasing. Andrew, you know a thing or two about white nationalism — being a white nationalist and all, what do you think he meant?
He didn’t condemn anyone, and he didn’t tell them to stand down — he told them to stand back and to stand by. What that appears to me to indicate is “wait until I give the signal.” I got shivers. I still have shivers. He is telling the people to stand by. As in: get ready for war. He’s not going to let these people just roll over him with this fraud plot. He’s going to tell his people to go out into the streets. He was asked to agree not to tell people to go out into the streets and he wouldn’t. Probably, this is going to end with the country breaking up, which is the exact thing that I wanted to happen.
Is Andrew Anglin okay? Also, I think this might be a violation of his own disclaimer:
We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable.
Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently.
So an actual, real world, unapologetic white nationalist thinks Donald Trump’s comments were a call to action.
David Duke, a more moderate figure than Anglin, did not feel called out, but certainly did not feel condemned:
Trump stood tall in refuting the lie that White nationalists are the problem in America. Trump came on extremely strong stating the truth that Antifa, BLM, Leftist Bolsheviks and the ZioMedia are the ones behind the anarchy, terror and destruction of free speech in America. He also exposed the hateful, vile racism against White people in “Critical Race Theory and Sensitivity Training.
How about Richard Spencer (who, I must say, has a very punchable face), who has said he’s voting for Joe Biden. Surely, if anyone would have a reason to feel condemned, it’s him:
Trump didn’t denounce “white supremacy.” Obviously, the term itself is a meaningless slur, but the fact that he didn’t take the bait is quite strong.
Nope, he doesn’t seem to feel all that denounced either. If Donald Trump condemned white nationalists, someone should really inform the white nationalists.
