Linked List: November 22, 2016

Tuesday, 22 November 2016

White Nationalists Exult in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’ ★

Joseph Goldstein, reporting for the NYT:

Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

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.

These are neo-Nazis, and they now think they are the establishment. This is not normal; this has nothing to do with the pre-Trump partisan divide — deep though it was — in the U.S. Neo-Nazis weren’t pulling for Mitt Romney or John McCain, and they didn’t celebrate George W. Bush’s election.

If you think this is no big deal, you are either with them, or you are in denial regarding a grave crisis.

A Nepotistic Kook for National Security Advisor ★

Nicholas Kristof, writing for the NYT:

The announcement that Trump has recruited Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser is particularly alarming. Flynn is smart and knows the world very well, but he was fired from his last government job for incompetence. Worse, he today is regarded by many Republican and Democratic foreign policy specialists as a kook. […]

Indeed, for an intelligence officer, Flynn seems to have trouble distinguishing truth from falsehood. Earlier this month, he tweeted an obviously fake story claiming that the police had found emails linking Hillary Clinton to sex crimes with children. When he was in government, subordinates had a special name for his delusions: “Flynn facts.” […]

For his chief of staff, Flynn chose his son, who is a looney on social media, calling President Obama a communist and fascist, tweeting racially insensitive comments and sharing absurd conspiracy theories.

Follow the link to those tweets. This is Jack D. “sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids” Ripper stuff. No national security advisor should be hiring one of his own children as chief of staff, let alone one who by all appearances lost his mind five years ago.