Hooded members of a southwestern Michigan Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan are pictured burning a fiery cross here at the rebirth of Klan activities in the area on Oct. 24, 1937. | Source: Bettmann / Getty
Former president Donald Trump has an upcoming campaign event in Howell, Michigan, a city known for its historic Ku Klux Klan rallies and where white supremacists gathered to praise both Trump and Adolf Hitler in the same breath. Now, Trump’s campaign is scrambling to deny any connection between Howell’s Klan-happy past and present, which is a connection people are only making because—well, you know—Trump rallies so often look and sound like diet Klan rallies.
For decades, Black folk in Michigan were told to avoid Howell because of its association with the KKK. And just last month, white supremacists marched through the city’s downtownhttps://t.co/ZXX3pPgIhF https://t.co/HC82qKSH1t
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 17, 2024
According to the Detroit Free Press, on July 20, a crowd of angry and perpetually aggrieved white people marched through the streets of Howell chanting “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” The campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t shy about seizing on the opportunity to point out that Trump and white supremacists go together like peas in a pod; like peanut butter and jelly; like spaghetti and meatballs; like the traditional KKK and the modern GOP.
“The racists and white supremacists who marched in Trump’s name last month in Howell have all watched him praise Hitler, defend neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and tell far-right extremists to ‘stand back and stand by.’ Trump’s actions have encouraged them, and Michiganders can expect more of the same when he comes to town next week,” Harris’s Michigan communications director, Alyssa Bradley, said in a statement reported by the Washington Post.
From the Post:
Pictures and video from the event showed attendees declaring their support for the former president while waving banners with white supremacist slogans. Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan because of the rallies Michigan-based Grand Dragon Robert Miles held on a nearby farm in the 1970s and 1980s, although community leaders have worked to shake off that image.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt saidthere was no connection between the choice of campaign stop and the history of extremist activity in the city. She noted that President Joe Biden visited Howell in 2021, and said Harris also visits cities where “racist protests and marches have occurred in the past.”
“President Trump will travel to Howell to deliver a strong message on law and order, making it clear that crime, violence, and hate of any form will have zero place in our country when he is back in the White House,” Leavitt said in an email.
Look, most people probably don’t believe Trump was scheduling his next wave of campaign events and decided they should coincide with the national Nazi tour — but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. According to the Post, “Biden visited Howell in 2021 to promote his infrastructure initiatives and a package to expand social programs,” and that might have garnered more attention if Biden was also a great replacement theorist whose campaign was largely centered around scaring the hell out of white people by convincing them they’re being pushed out of the country by brown people, DEI and all crime that their fellow Caucasians don’t largely commit. (Or so they’re told.) In fact, the Post noted that when Biden visited Howell the only people who protested were the residents of the county, which he lost to Trump in 2020 by more than 20 percentage points. (Suffice it to say, Trump never accused election workers in Howell of maleficence. He saved that orangey-white nationalist propaganda for Detroit voters because — well, you know.)
Trump spearheaded the propaganda-reliant attack on critical race theory, issued an executive order banning diversity training in the workplace during his presidency, and is now promising to end all DEI programs across America if he’s elected again. He has also whined on behalf of white America that white people are the true victims of racism — in a country that is more than 60% white and where white people dominate every important entity in Western society from the corporate world to state and federal governments to all aspects of the justice system. Trump and his campaign would have us believe it’s some yuge coincidence that around the same time white supremacists were chanting his name in Howell, they were also marching in Nashville, including members of the group “Whites Against Replacement” (WAR), who were handing out flyers that read: “Diversity means fewer white people. Inclusion means exclusion of white people. Equity means stealing from white people.”
The KKK has historically told white people that non-white people were taking over America and that they were the cause of all of their problems. The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation made Black people out to be primitive monsters. Trump has made much of his campaign about bringing that same energy in his depictions of Black and Latino migrants, who he has generalized as rapists and drug dealers, compared to Hannibal Lecter, and called “animals” who are “not human” during his rallies. He also claimed at a rally that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and if that’s not blatant “Heil Hitler!” energy, then what is?
Just last week, Trump’s campaign came under fire for posting an image of Black migrants to scare white people into thinking that’s what all of America will become if Harris is elected president.
Import the third world
Become the third world pic.twitter.com/MVawiHQSpm
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 13, 2024
In fact, Trump rallies and Klan rallies have so much in common that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke once accused Trump of jacking his political style.
When Leavitt says Trump’s rally in Howell will be focused on crime, what she likely means is that Trump is going to do what he and his fellow GOP goons did during the Republican National Convention, which is lie about how crime has surged in America — while, truthfully, it has virtually done nothing but decline since the early 1990s and crime analysts report that U.S. crime, in general, is currently at a 50-year low — and about how that non-existent surge in crime is caused largely by migrants, an assertion that is also unsupported by facts or statistical data.
Trump’s rallies are anti-diversity, anti-POC and blatantly pro-white. His rally in Howell won’t be a deviation from the county’s history — it will be a commemoration of it.
SEE ALSO:
Florida Official Resigns Amid KKK Photo After DeSantis Hand-Picked Him To Lead Black County
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