A few hundred white supremacists and alt-right believers met in Washington, D.C. over the weekend. Their mission? To celebrate Donald Trump’s ascendance to the highest office in the land. Naturally, MySpace sweetheart and noted anti-Semite Tila Tequila was in attendance. The former Shot of Love and Surviving Nugent star posted the above photo of a “heil victory!” salute with fellow members. Her enthusiasm earned a retweet from Jake Tapper, whose fingers only reported the facts (but one can easily envision the face he was probably making while typing).
White supremacist conference in DC, where spirits were high today https://t.co/rflp3EDWY9
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 19, 2016
The New York Times has the inside details of the “restless” crowd, who was ready to let loose after 11 hours of speeches that urged the crowd of 200 to “act more like the establishment” and not-so underground. At the end, alt-right leader Richard B. Spencer switched courses:
[N]ow his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.
The rest of the piece discusses Spencer’s attempt to quell unsavory sentiments while celebrating Trump’s victory, but inevitably, the white-supremacist sentiments kept seeped out. Spencer’s final speech accused the media of favoring Jewish interests while trying to beat Trump down, and his audience had already prepared the requisite Nazi-era vocab:
Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.
The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.
The Trump transition team hasn’t acknowledged this conference, but these supporters will be hard to shake off. The NY Times calls out how Trump “built a campaign around the issues that mattered most to them.” He’s still the guy who fed the alt-right and their love of conspiracy theories during wild rallies. However, Trump’s campaign was mortified at the rabid fandom flowing from the KKK, which formally endorsed him in their “newspaper.” This was one of only a few newspaper endorsements that he received, yet Trump still won the presidency. Then, he chose Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart publication caters to anti-Semitic viewpoints, as his chief strategist.
Here’s a video clip of Spencer’s speech, if you dare to watch.
(Via New York Times & The Atlantic)