A "Nazis Go Home" sign is seen at a "Unite the Right" counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. Photo: Susan Melkisethian

Opinion | Politics

Steve Russell: Racial fantasies and the Superman occupying the White House

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

White supremacists cheered the rise of President Donald Trump and it looks like their racial fantasies are coming true with each passing day. Steve Russell, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, takes a closer look at America today:

You may have seen the video after the last election. The speaker who was deliriously happy, and as the guy worked his audience into the same delirium that “one of us” was just elected President, he threw caution to the winds, raised his arm in a familiar salute, and began chanting, “Heil, Trump! Heil Trump!”
The speaker, intoxicated by a distant whiff of power, was the man an appalled high school classmate Graeme Wood called “our generation’s most prominent white supremacist,” Richard Spencer. I commend to your attention Wood’s profile of Spencer in the June issue of The Atlantic.
I looked nervously at the calendar, wondering if a time warp had transported me to November of 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch. Adolf Hitler made his revolutionary bones in that failed coup d’état, got himself convicted of treason and packed off to prison, where he used his time to write what would become the manifesto of the Nazi Party, Mein Kampf.
That wretched screed would be of little import but for the millions of human lives that were extinguished in the service of the crackpottery Hitler propagated. The man wrote as if Aristotle had never lived. He trampled what had been thought to be the rules of political discourse, just as Donald J. Trump would do later.

Read More on the Story:
Steve Russell: Supermen in the White House (Indian Country Media Network August 22, 2017)