Caveats, preliminaries and disclaimers: Yes, Don Trump Jr is deplorable, Trump Sr has undoubtedly been influenced by, supported and dog-whistled to white nationalists, 88 is a legitimate white nationalist code, etc.
I think this story (the version I happened to catch was published on the conglomerate-universe formerly known as Gawker LLC) is bullshit.
https://splinternews.com/donald-trump-j ... 1830203784
It claims that Don Jr's tweet about independent senator Angus King was a baldfaced invocation of "white genocide" and that he deliberately strategically fudged a stat from 83% to 88% to dogwhistle to white nationalists; 88 being, of course, code for Heil Hitler given that H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.
The thing is the discourse of "repopulating" Maine with Somalis goes back like 15 years. And the scope of immigration to small towns in Maine was very very unusual. I don't have exact numbers but I've read about towns of like 30K (presumably largely white) that took on > 1K Somalis all at once.
None of which diminishes what should be terrifying about the mainstreaming of white nationalism and its mythos. But this shit is going to backfire, if its not already.
There must be several hundred strident folks on Twitter loudly proclaiming weak speculation as fact: ie “Let’s be clear about what happened here — Donald Trump Jr misstated statistics so he could attack Angus King with a neo-Nazi dogwhistle,” from a ThinkProgress journalist.
Like, maybe? And maybe too I have some latent dyslexia or something and so get my stats frequently mixed-up but I can say unequivocally that mixing up 83 and 88 or vice versa would be absolutely par for the course for me. And I'm still absolutely an ally to the anti-Trump cause, but what's increasingly passing for fact of late is very disturbing to me. Nazism and white nationalism and etc have very specific historical contexts. I find it dangerous to begin blending them together as in this kind of puff-piece where base-level (and, sadly, quite plebeian) psychological xenophobia (ie "It had the standard fearmongering of the “other,”) is now taken as critical evidence of covert but explicit support for WN politics. I'd mark the fuck out of a student's paper if it used the same evidence to make the same argument.
This dependence on literalism really terrifies me. Because it feels so dangerous. It's great that there is a big shift in the larger culture's willingness to countenance white supremacy and the quite-active legacy of colonialism here. But it's, to my thinking, a very bad sign when it forces a kind of paranoid literalism to do so.
