A rundown of some contrary talking points:
1. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from white supremacist organizations?
No, because there are not enough organized white supremacists to make up “a lot” of anyone’s support.
According to
Wikipedia on KKK membership:
As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total
The KKK is
really small. They could all stay in the same
hotel with a bunch of free rooms left over. Or put another way: the entire membership of the KKK is less than the daily readership of this blog.
If you Google “trump KKK”, you get 14.8 million results. I know that Google’s list of results numbers isn’t very accurate. Yet even if they’re inflating the numbers by 1000x, and there were only about 14,000 news articles about the supposed Trump-KKK connection this election, there are still
two to three articles about a Trump-KKK connection for every single Klansman in the world.
I don’t see any sign that there are other official white supremacy movements that are larger than the Klan, or even enough other small ones to substantially raise the estimate of people involved. David Duke called a big pan-white-supremacist meeting in New Orleans in 2005, and despite getting groups from across North America and Europe he was only able to muster 300 attendees (by comparison,
NAACP conventions routinely get 10,000).
My guess is that the number of organized white supremacists in the country is in the very low five digits.
2. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from online white nationalists and the alt-right?
No, for the same reason.
The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, st0rmfr0nt, and *****’s politics board.
The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.
st0rmfr0nt’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the st0rmfr0nt community.
***** boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of *****’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of ***** traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on *****.
Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.
50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the ***** stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)
So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.
Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.
and he has gone totally radar silent since then. No social media, etc.
I am aware of the difference between White Nationalism and the Klu Klux Klan. It is the mainstream media and butthurt Hillary supporters who are conflating the two. One thing the two "groups" have in common is that neither are meaningfully relevant outside of their use as liberal boogeymen. The Klan is, for all intents and purposes, dead, and if this pathetic showing is any indication, "White Nationalism" in the form of these distinct organizations is impotent. Please show me the vast power that these groups are wielding that makes you so scared.
at that fukking guy