Josh Harkinson Make America Hate Again
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On Monday evening, California's secretary of state published a list of delegates chosen by the Trump campaign for the upcoming Republican presidential primary in the state. Trump'south slate includes William Johnson, one of the land's most prominent white nationalists. [Update: Responding to this story late Tuesday, the Trump campaign blamed Johnson's selection on a "database error," and Johnson told Female parent Jones he would resign. Here are documents showing the Trump campaign'southward personal correspondence with Johnson yesterday.]
Johnson applied to the Trump campaign to be a delegate. He was accepted on Monday. In order to be canonical he had to sign this pledge sent to him past the campaign: "I, William Johnson, endorse Donald J. Trump for the office of President of the United states of america. 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 tin can Brand AMERICA Peachy AGAIN!" After he signed, the Trump campaign added his name to the list of 169 delegates it forwarded to the secretary of state.
"I can be a white nationalist and exist a strong supporter of Donald Trump and exist a good example to everybody," Johnson says.
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 ain and possesses at most a few thousand members, simply it is "arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country," co-ordinate to Mark Potok, a senior fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Middle (SPLC), which tracks hate groups.
Johnson got the news that he had been selected by Trump in a congratulatory electronic mail sent to him by the campaign's California delegate coordinator, Katie Lagomarsino. "I merely hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views," Johnson tells Mother Jones. "I can exist a white nationalist and be a potent supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody."
Johnson says that in his application to be a delegate for Trump he disclosed multiple details about his background and activism, though he did not specifically use the term "white nationalist." The Trump campaign and Lagomarsino did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Whether or not Johnson was vetted by the Trump campaign, the GOP front end-runner would have a difficult fourth dimension claiming ignorance of Johnson'due south extreme views: Johnson has gained notice during the presidential master for funding pro-Trump robocalls that convey a white nationalist message. "The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are agape to be called 'racist,'" Johnson says in one robocall pushed out to residential landlines in Vermont and Minnesota. "Donald Trump is not racist, simply Donald Trump is not afraid. Don't vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump."
Illustration: Kelsey Dake
Armed with cash from affluent donors and staffed by what the motility considers to be its top thinkers, the AFP now dedicates most of its resources to supporting Trump. Johnson claims that the AFP's pro-Trump robocalls, which take delivered Johnson's personal cellphone number to voters in vii states, have helped the party find hundreds of new members. "[Trump] is allowing usa to talk about things we've non been able to talk about," Johnson says. "So even if he is non elected, he has achieved great things."
On multiple occasions, Trump has failed to forcefully repudiate this sort of support. After being endorsed by erstwhile Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in August last year, Trump told Bloomberg News, "I don't need his endorsement; I certainly wouldn't want his endorsement. I don't need anybody's endorsement."
Asked in Feb near the robocalls, which are funded by Johnson through a super-PAC, a Trump spokeswoman would simply tell CNN that the candidate had "disavowed all super-PACs offering their support." In April, the Huffington Postal service reported that Trump returned a $250 donation to his campaign from Johnson.
The SPLC'south Potok says Trump has "legitimized and mainstreamed detest" in ways we haven't seen since the days of George Wallace. Though nobody can say for sure how many people vest to America's largest hate groups, the SPLC has found that the number of such groups grew by 14 percent in 2015, reversing years of declines. Potok worries that Trump could fuel the spread of the AFP'south ideas for years to come up.
Johnson is a corporate lawyer who grows persimmons and raises chickens at his 67-acre "ranch" in a Los Angeles suburb. When I met him recently outside his law role in downtown LA'south Earth Trade Centre, he was in high spirits. He suggested brightly that nosotros walk downstairs to get dejeuner at a nearby Korean eatery. Equally we sat next to a table of immaculately coiffed Korean Air flight attendants, I mentioned that some might find it surprising that a guy who wrote a book advocating the cosmos of an all-white ethno-state was eating a plate of bulgogi beef with kimchee. "Koreans don't have to brand Korean food," he said affair-of-factly. "One of the best Chinese restaurants I went to in the Bay Area is owned by a Mormon and cooked by a Mormon. Really great Chinese food."
"This message is paid for by William Johnson, a farmer and a white nationalist."
Short, graying, and 61 years quondam, Johnson favors pressed white shirts and bookish blackness-framed glasses. He grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods in Arizona and Oregon before moving to Japan in 1974 to study the language. It was in that location that locals engaged him in "open" discussions about differences betwixt the races, and he came to run across America'south European heritage equally its biggest—and most vulnerable—asset. (This trajectory is non uncommon: Jared Taylor, head of the white nationalist group American Renaissance, also speaks fluent Japanese, and Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler became a white supremacist while immersed in the degree organization in India.) In 1985, Johnson published, under a pseudonym, Amendment to the Constitution: Averting the Pass up and Fall of America, a book calling for the abolitionism of the 14th and fifteenth Amendments and the displacement of all nonwhites. He tried to sound a applied tone, allowing, for example, that African Americans should receive "a rich dowry to enable them to prosper in their homeland."
The book was a hit on the talk show excursion, and Johnson of a sudden found himself actualization on television alongside neo-Nazi skinheads and Klansmen. By 1989, his notoriety and clean-cut appeal convinced a group of white nationalists in Wyoming to tap him to run for Dick Cheney's vacant congressional seat. He garnered a flurry of printing coverage when he earned enough signatures to qualify for the ballot; effectually the aforementioned time, the building housing his California police force office was bombed. Johnson says the FBI accused him of detonating it himself in a bid for more press. (The bureau declined to comment.)
"The skinheads thought I was besides farthermost to run the organization."
Xx years later, afterwards unsuccessfully running for various other offices, Johnson became the head of the American Freedom Political party (and so known as American Third Position), at the request of a group of Southern California skinheads. Johnson's post was supposed to be temporary: "The skinheads thought I was too farthermost to run the system," he explained. But they were the ones who ended upwardly dropping out, replaced by what has get a sort of white nationalist encephalon trust: Political party leaders at present include a former Reagan assistants appointee and a professor emeritus at California Country University-Long Beach.
Afterward our Korean tiffin, Johnson rushed support to his office to host the latest episode of For God and Country, a Christian AM talk show currently broadcast in California, Louisiana, and Texas. His Filipino American co-host, the Rev. Ronald Tan, nodded approvingly as Johnson praised Trump on the air for "busting up the concept of political correctness."
The show allows Johnson to push a Trump-centric version of white nationalism to a potentially receptive audience—up to a point. Several radio stations in Iowa recently canceled the plan out of objection to its content. During a commercial break, Johnson fidgeted. "Are yous going to quote any more Scriptures?" he asked Tan nervously. "Has the station said that we're not Christian enough?" Back on the air, Tan pivoted to 1 Samuel 16, comparing Trump to King David.
In addition to promoting Trump on the radio and over the phone, the AFP streams a podcast called the Daily Trump Phenomenon Hour. Information technology has gear up upwards a "political harassment hotline" for Trump supporters who wish to consult with an attorney virtually being attacked or verbally abused past anti-Trump protesters. Johnson has personally spent $thirty,000 on the Trump promotions, including $18,000 for the robocalls.
The robocalls, the radio testify, and the "harassment hotline" were all things that Johnson mentioned in his application to become a Trump delegate. He specifically cited an anti-Romney robocall commissioned in Utah this by March, which begins, in part, "My name is William Johnson. I am a farmer and a white nationalist."
After wrapping upwards the radio bear witness, Johnson led me through his office, where a brush-painted screen hangs alongside shelves stacked with Japanese books and dictionaries. Many of his legal clients, it turns out, are foreigners who speak English as a second language. Nevertheless Johnson says he sees no problem with Trump's isolationist foreign policy, even if it hurts his business—ideally, he'd like to requite upward his do and serve as Trump's secretary of agriculture.
We concluded upward in a mirrored briefing room to meet with iii AFP sympathizers, two centre-aged women and a boyfriend. They talked most how Trump had enabled a new kind of "honest discourse," how he wasn't a racist but a "racialist," and how he had left them feeling "emancipated." Johnson also at present finds information technology easier to be himself: "For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: 'Oh, you're a hatemonger, you're a Nazi, yous're like Hitler,'" he confessed. "Now they come in and say, 'Oh, you're like Donald Trump.'"
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/donald-trump-white-nationalist-afp-delegate-california/
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