Trump and The White Supremacists

++Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly did me, a freckled person a service by explaining the Donald's white supremacist appeal. At Huffington Post, David Marans and Kim Bellware tell you who they are in "Donald Trump's White Supremacist Fan Club."

++Kilgore piece which is a must-read builds on the work of Evan Osmos and Dave Weigel, who happened upon the white supremacists while following the Donald around.

++A key player in this support is a Richard Spencer, who heads the National Policy Institute in Utah, which is devoted to "the heritage,identity,and future of European people in the United States and around the world."

++Spencer and his group has rebranded "white supremacy" as "identitarians" or "alt.Right". The "identitarians" were inspired by Pat Buchanan's book the Death of the West, where Pat warned that the wave on non-European immigrants threaten our existence.

++I'm glad we are now down to European-Americans. But this still raises the issue of "whiteness" as I've commented on before. Richard Trumpka and General Petraeus would not have been considered "white" in America during the 1930s. Are they now? Are all American Jews considered European-Americans or only those descended from German Jews? 

++Problematic in the recent Trump stories is how a Hollywood producer game him Hitler's "New World Order", which were speeches by Adolf Hitler. Trump's ex-wife tried to sanitized the story by saying the producer was Jewish, as if that may it alright. The producer was contacted and vehemently denied he was Jewish. 

++It is troubling when all the events of the past year have indicated that the United States has to come to gripes with its institutional racism. Yes "Black Lives Matter" but not so much to Richard Spencer.

++The "identitarians" are not characters from Garrison Keillor's Lake Webegon reminiscing about Swedish days in Minnesota. 

++In my naiveté, I thought President Obama's election would have brought a great sensitivity and appreciation of how deep and rooted are the separate ethic and racial identities in our history. 

++A simple and positive example of this was The National Park Service publishing a history of Hispanics who fought on both sides of the Civil War. I didn't know a Castro got the first Medal of Honor or that a Cuban madame in New Orleans was a key confederate spy. 

++ If the sense of a public good vanishes , so does the sense of our national identity. It would be hypocritical of me as a descendent on both sides of my family of "undocumented immigrants" to light out after those in the country now. 

++American history is not the province for any single ethnic or racial group. How do I understand my family  losing half its males as casualties in the Civil war without learning about the history of slavery? How do I understand the marriage of one of my ancestors to a very beautiful Cherokee woman without delving into the Carlise School for Indians in Pennsylvania? It seems these forays make our history the richer,yet more tragic.