The winner of last week’s presidential debate was fear.
Far-right radicals and militia groups got a huge fist bump when President Trump was unwilling to condemn their actions in front of a live audience of 73 million.
By debate’s end, the Proud Boys militia group had modified their logo to include Trump’s advice to “Stand back and stand by.”
The Proud Boys are “men” who believe in white racial purity and get their kicks out of terrorizing groups — Blacks, the LGBTQ community, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, immigrants, feminists — and wear enough armor to fend off Armageddon.
An offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, they first made headlines in 2017 at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville where a white supremacist rammed his car into peaceful counter-protestors, killing a woman.
Even then, the president refused to call out the extremists, saying, “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had some very good people, on both sides.”
Begging to differ, but there is no such thing as a good racist.
The president’s nominal reply, then and now, serves to incite more violence — something they seemingly thirst after.
The Proud Boys is in fact a paramilitary movement that conducts training camps to hone their fighting techniques.
At Charlottesville, these militia groups were so heavily armed that the Virginia governor refrained from asking local police to protect the counter-protestors for fear of being overtaken.
They are not, as they say, neutral, nor do they have permission to enforce the law, as they maintain. Their presence at rallies and demonstrations — be it for racial justice or, in the case of Michigan where they stormed the state capitol while legislators were debating a face mask policy — is intimidating and threatening.
So when they hear the president advise them to “stand by” many will take it as a call to arms.
IN RECENT testimony, FBI director Christopher Wray warned Congress that the violence perpetrated by white supremacists is “the most lethal activity in the U.S. today.”
It’s not those “leftists” demonstrating for racial justice, income equality or the expansion of Medicaid who are the threat, as Mr. Trump maintains.
Instead, it’s Americans whose moral fibers have been warped by hate of people whose skin is of a different color, or whose faith or lifestyle is foreign to them.
At Tuesday’s debate, the president said he’d never heard of The Proud Boys, which, if true, is truly alarming, and we hope he gets brought up to date ASAP by federal law enforcment authorities.
