The American Nazi Movement in the Era of Trump

What is the alt-right? Above all, it's a harmless-sounding euphemism for "white nationalism." What is white nationalism? What follows is its most recent and most joyous blossoming on American soil.

Last Saturday in Washington, D.C., the alt-right held an all-day celebration of Donald Trump's election. White nationalists have embraced Trump, and Trump has embraced them back, naming the movement's number one publisher, Steve Bannon, as his right-hand man (so to speak).

Richard B. Spencer

A man named Richard B. Spencer both coined the term "alt-right" and is currently president of the organization spreading its doctrine, the National Policy Institute.

At the conclusion of Saturday's pep rally for Trump in the Ronald Reagan Building and National Trade Center on Pennsylvania Avenue, Spencer said and did this:

Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.

The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”

Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning.

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews....

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

If this doesn't shoot shards of ice into the chambers of your beating heart, then you either don't know history or don't care what Donald Trump is now mid-wifing into the heart of the American democracy.