Definition of a hate group: Consider the Republican party as GQP

This Leonard Pitts Jr., echo opinion in the Miami Herald, was published in July 2019, but worthy of a revival reading.  

Mr. Pitts wrote: Here’s how The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group.  Consider the rapidly growing morph "GQP".

It is, they say, “an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” That definition is offered preparatory to an explosive question:

Is the Republican Party a hate group?

Granted, in its “official statements or principles,” the party doesn’t meet the SPLC standard for a hate group. Nevertheless, it activities and the statements of its leaders are another matter.

Consider that  #FormerGuy Trump, demanded that four progressive congresswomen, four women of color, four Americans, “go back” to the countries they came from. It devolved from that low point to a lower one, as an overwhelmingly white audience of Trump supporters booed the mention of one of the women, Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar. “Send her back!” they chanted.

It’s not that we haven’t seen political parties exploit racial animosity before. Democrats even thrived on that, even into the 1960s. After the Civil Rights Movement made open appeals to racism politically perilous, the GOP evolved its infamous “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white racism without mentioning race at all.

Lee Atwater, party chairman, aide to Ronald Reagan and campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, explained this in a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff …”

For half a century, then, the GOP has taught white voters racial resentment, taught them to prioritize concerns about white prerogative over concerns about shuttered factories, dirty water, lack of healthcare, foreclosed futures. It did this in code — “Willie Horton,” “tax cuts,” “welfare queen” — which, while obvious to all but the most gullible, still allowed respectable white men and women to maintain fig leaves of deniability.

So politicians accepted the votes, but never had to acknowledge the means of their manufacture. White voters gave them the votes, but never had to confront the reasons they did so.

Mission of ADL is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.

#FormerGuy Donald Trump is the payoff of that devil’s bargain. 

His “innovation” has been to shred subtlety and abandon code. 

With blunt, brutish clarity, he tells four black and brown women to “go back” where they came from, and if you don’t see racism there, you’ll never see it anywhere.

Yet bad as that is, the monstrous part is that his audience, trained by 50 years of appeals to their basest selves, cheers him on. They no longer need fig leaves. That should tell you something. As should the fact that the GOP seems to have abandoned policy altogether.

What do they stand for? Do they still care about the national debt? Do they have a strategy to combat global warming? What will they do about Russia and Iran? Who knows?

Because, the GQP, is now the party of “Send her back!” — of outrage over Colin Kaepernick kneeling and April Ryan asking questions. That’s what passes for ideas in today’s GOP. 

Moreover, if that’s what Trump has made them, it’s not like they fought him tooth and nail.

So is the GQP a hate group? It’s sobering that the question can even be asked. But the inevitable answer is downright chilling. Because, the SPLC offers a fair and cogent definition of that term.

And, clearly, the GOP (aka GQP!) fits it with room to spare.

Rosenthal ~ Holocaust survivor fears a history repeat

To Jack Rosenthal, the hate-filled imagery was something he never thought he’d see again, at least not in the United States.

Alert to Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate President Mitch McConnell ~ stop Donald Trump racism!

A Holocaust Survivor ~ Warnings about Charlottesville:

“You see something like this, you know, it brings back memories and I’m concerned about what could happen in this country.” by Alessandra Freitas in the Huffington Post

 Alessandra Freitas

Shock and anger were common feelings for most Americans who followed the recent tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

To Jack Rosenthal, the hate-filled imagery was something he never thought he’d see again, at least not in the United States.

Rosenthal is one of 10,000 Romanian refugees who came to America after World War II. At 88 years old, he still mourns the loss of seven family members who died in the Auschwitz death camp. He was the only one to survive.

He was born and raised in a farming village in northern Romania. “Altogether in my village, there were 26 Jewish families,” Rosenthal told HuffPost. Most of them didn’t survive either.

Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were massacred in pogroms, slaughtered in death camps or otherwise murdered by Romanian authorities, German forces and others during the war.

Rosenthal was 16 when he was taken to Auschwitz, the German Nazi camp in occupied Poland. 

Later, he was transferred to Buchenwald, another camp near Weimar, Germany, where he was forced to work for the Nazis ― the only reason he was kept alive, until U.S. military forces began to evacuate the camp’s 28,000 prisoners in 1945. 

Rosenthal came to the U.S. hoping to find a new beginning.

“After I was liberated, I thought to myself the world has learned what terrible traces hate can bring to humanity,” he said. “And now this gives me a depressing feeling because it’s happening again, and it’s happening now.”

The successful real estate agent watched the protests from his home in Roslyn, New York, where he lives during the warmer months of the year. In the winter, Rosenthal flies to Florida.

Decades later, he remembers how hard it was to get settled in the U.S. while dealing with the trauma from the war. “When I came here, I used to get really bad nightmares and I would get up in middle of the night not being able to go back to sleep,” he said.

Those days of lingering fear and uncertainty felt much closer after watching neo-Nazis rage during the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, he said. 

But after all the anti-Semitic speeches and the deadly car attack, it was one particular detail that caught Rosenthal’s attention.

He noticed it while reading about a Aug. 14 court hearing for James Alex Fields Jr., the man accused of plowing his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the white nationalist rally, leaving a 32-year-old woman dead and injuring at least 19 other people. 

The article included a photo of Matthew Heimbach, who had helped promote the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, voicing his displeasure outside the courtroom after a judge denied bail for Fields.

The white supremacist’s T-shirt was the first thing Rosenthal saw. On the shirt was a picture of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, a pre-WWII leader of the Romanian fascist Legion of Saint Michael the Archangel and the Iron Guard political party, which were both linked to the Nazi party.

Codreanu urged the destruction of the Jewish community in Romania. Members of his Iron Guard responded with brutality both before and during the war, including a horrifying massacre in Bucharest that killed over 100 Jews.

“I recognized the name right away,” Rosenthal said. “You see something like this, you know, it brings back memories and I’m concerned about what could happen in this country,” he said.

The groups behind the Unite the Right rally are not the only ones of their kind. According to a February report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 917 hate groups exist throughout the country.

Many Americans were concerned when President Donald Trump failed to immediately condemn white supremacy in responding to the Charlottesville violence. Instead, Trump blamed both sides of the protests ― a point he repeated.

“You cannot compare fascism and Nazis to the other people protesting. Maybe there are people on both sides who are misguided, but there is simply no comparison,” Rosenthal said.

And he reminded us that the consequences of going through horrific violence never really end. “It’s 70 years after the war and it still has a tremendous impact on me,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never forget and that’ll always be with me as long as I live.”

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, the number of Jews killed by the Iron Guard was significantly overstated in an earlier version of the story. The individual pogroms that killed thousands and tens of thousands of Jews in Romania during World War II were carried out by official Romanian and German forces.