White supremacist groups credit surging interest to Donald Trump: 'He's certainly creating a movement'
As the Republican Party grows more and more concerned about Donald Trump, at least one group is loving his rise to prominence: white supremacists. Politico reports that the white supremacist website Stormfront has had to upgrade its servers to handle all the new traffic coming their way since Trump took off in the polls; the Ku Klux Klan confirms that Trump has served as a major talking point for feeling out recruits.
"He's made it okay to talk about these incredible concerns of European Americans today," former KKK grand wizard and onetime Louisiana representative David Duke said.
Hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump's statements about banning Muslims and rounding up Mexicans have "energized" racist intellectuals and neo-Nazis. "When well-known public figures make these kind of statements in the public square, they are taken as a permission-giving by criminal elements who go out and act on their words," SPLC's Mark Potak told Politico.
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But some white supremacists remain skeptical of Trump's plans. "Do we honestly believe that he's going to block all the Muslims and deport all the illegals? I think he's doing a lot of this just to signal to people that he's on their side," Brad Griffin of the white nationalist blog Occidental Dissent said.
"He'd have to employ the military to do it, and I don't think they're going to do that," agreed former KKK leader Tom Metzger.
But that doesn't seem to bother him too much. "As long as [Trump is] causing chaos and havoc with the citizens, he's fine with me," Metzger said. "I love it."
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