Video: President Trump wants to reduce legal and illegal immigration, but apparently has no qualms about scapegoating every immigrant in the process. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
By Dana Milbank
I tuned in to President Trump’s event on immigration. Before I knew it, I had tumbled down a rabbit hole of white supremacy.
The president, in need of a change of subject from the treatment of migrant children at the border, brought in “angel” moms and dads on Friday who are “permanently separated from their loved ones” killed by illegal immigrants.
The purpose was to stoke fears that an illegal-immigrant crime wave is swamping the nation. Voluminous evidence shows that illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes in greater proportion than native-born Americans. But the angel parents had been told otherwise.
“You know,” said Mary Ann Mendoza, one of the angel moms on stage with Trump, “if the public would go to illegalaliencrimereport.com and see the magnitude of crimes being committed against your fellow Americans by illegal aliens allowed to stay in this country, you will be sickened.”
I did as she said and looked into the Illegal Alien Crime Report. I was indeed sickened by what I found: white-nationalist claims of “genocide” and a “Holocaust” being perpetrated against white Americans. And now, those promoting such filth are getting mentioned behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal, at an official event hosted by the president himself.
The Illegal Alien Crime Report’s Facebook page quickly led me to an item it had posted the day before the White House meeting, a new video entitled “American Holocaust,” prominently featuring two of the parents who shared the stage with Trump and the person who runs Illegal Alien Crime Report, Dave Gibson. The group called it a “stirring video on the ongoing genocide being committed by illegal aliens and the U.S. politicians who encourage and protect them.”
In the video, Gibson claims that “we have a 9/11 in this country every three years,” because of people killed by illegal immigrants. The maker of the video, Frank Jorge, sits in front of a photo of Trump and says “many places have already been repopulated with third-worlders who have nothing in common with the American people,” part of a plan to lure “new citizens for the country to replace us, the American people.”
“What we have is an American holocaust,” Jorge says over an image of President Barack Obama.
The video gets worse from there, showing war footage of Nazis’ victims, corpses in concentration-camp uniforms lined up and in piles. “There are among us people who are monsters,” Jorge says. “The difference between the American Holocaust and the Holocaust that took place in Germany is that, in Germany, the government rounded up the people and had them murdered. Here, it is done by foreigners, … but behind it all, it’s our government.”
Jorge had Gibson on his internet radio show on Sunday, during which they spoke about the benefit of the mention at the event on Friday (the site crashed from the traffic) and Jorge called for violence against politicians.
“When is somebody going to get to some representative and f—- him up for letting our people get murdered? When is it gonna happen? Because it’s goddamned overdue.” Jorge added that politicians “need to bleed.”
Gibson said he hoped for “a revolution in California” in which “these self-loathing white people” find out what the immigrants “actually think of these gringos … and let them have it.”
Charming.
The purpose of reciting this is not to besmirch the grieving angel parents, some of whom I suspect are being misled. Neither is it to say this was a deliberate nod to white nationalists by the White House. (Trump’s tweets about an invading infestation of immigrants unworthy of due process accomplish that.) Rather, it is yet another peek at the ugliness that lurks just beneath the surface of support for Trump and his nativist policies.
Gibson told me he’s a “law-and-order” guy, not a white supremacist. He said the ideas of genocide and Holocaust were Jorge’s and that “I didn’t make the film,” but merely promoted it. Surprisingly, the man responsible for the Illegal Alien Crime Report didn’t challenge the studies saying illegal immigrants don’t commit more crime. “I don’t know if it’s a higher proportion,” he said, calling it “very difficult to get an actual number.”
And the Cuban-born video-maker Jorge, whose website features a slogan from last year’s march by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, as well as an interview with white supremacist Jared Taylor with the headline “Whites Deserve a Homeland”? He said in an email that he does not “advocate violence against elected officials,” but rather going after them on social media.
There have always been such characters in American life. The difference is they now can hope for a White House shout-out.
Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter @Milbank.
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