It's time for media and everyone else pretending Trump isn't a racist, fascist pig to give up that delusion and get down to it.
The California Secretary of State published candidates' delegate slates today, and guess who Donald Trump selected?
William Johnson, head of the American Freedom Party, a proudly white nationalist organization. Johnson's organization, by the way, recently set up a hotline for "abused Trump supporters."
Mother Jones reports:
Johnson applied to the Trump campaign to be a delegate. He was accepted on Monday. In order to be approved he had to sign this pledge sent to him by the campaign: "I, William Johnson, endorse Donald J. Trump for the office of President of the United States. I pledge to cast ALL of my ballots to elect Donald J. Trump on every round of balloting at the 2016 Republican National Convention so that we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" After he signed, the Trump campaign added his name to the list of 169 delegates it forwarded to the secretary of state.
Johnson leads the American Freedom Party, a group that "exists to represent the political interests of White Americans" and aims to preserve "the customs and heritage of the European American people." The AFP has never elected a candidate of its own and possesses at most a few thousand members, but it is "arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country," according to Mark Potok, a senior fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups.
The SPLC's report sets out the blueprint for how a Trump deportation scheme would work.
In 1985, under the pseudonym James O. Pace, Johnson wrote the book Amendment to the Constitution: Averting the Decline and Fall of America. In it, he advocates the repeal of the 14th and 15th amendments and the deportation of almost all nonwhite citizens to other countries. Johnson further claimed that racial mixing and diversity caused social and cultural degeneration in the United States. He wrote: "We lose our effectiveness as leaders when no one relies on us or can trust us because of our nonwhite and fractionalized nature. … [R]acial diversity has given us strife and conflict and is enormously counterproductive."
Johnson's solution to this problem was to deport all nonwhites as soon as possible. Anybody with any "ascertainable trace of Negro blood" or more than one-eighth "Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood" would be deported under the Pace Amendment.
To smooth the process, Johnson proposed that financial incentives be offered to nonwhites who cooperate with the government in the deportation process. Nonwhites who are too old to leave would be allowed to stay, as they were past childbearing age and did not present an obstacle to long-term racial homogeneity. Johnson imagined that black Americans could be employed to help the transition. He wrote, "Because of their physical abilities, the blacks would be the ideal enforcers." Johnson believed it critical that the amendment be enacted; if not, he said, nonwhites would strip rights from white Americans, potentially leading to a deadly "race war." For Johnson, the deportation of nonwhites is an act of self-defense, a preemptive strike in defense of real Americans.
Media really must step up on this and start to associate these radical, extreme, fringe haters with the candidate they support. David Duke, now this guy?
Enough is enough.
Bonus: TPM has an interview with Johnson from last January. Here's a tease:
“We have a lot of supporters who are not white, ‘cause they think that the white population has really retreated from the world stage,” he told TPM. “We’re doing this for everybody.”
'Murica.
Update:
The Trump campaign blames Mr. Johnson's appointment on a "database error." No, really.
Statement from Trump campaign: https://t.co/1wFoZBBGN2 pic.twitter.com/iR0aILYx5W
— Philip Bump (@pbump) May 10, 2016
Oops.
This seems like an appropriate paraphrase:
It seems our database of white nationalist leaders was unintentionally merged with our database of delegates. Could happen to any campaign.
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) May 10, 2016
