President Trump has spent the majority of his presidency playing footsie and blowing dogwhistles to his white supremacist fan base. Whether he’s promoting white supremacist conspiracy theories in his tweets and speeches, telling murderous neo-Nazis they were “very fine people,” or “accidentally” promoting white supremacist symbols on Twitter, the frequency of the incidents is more than enough to dispell any credibility to his vehement denials.
Thank you for the support as we MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/qKgwRMSgcf
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2019
Activists were quick to point out that a video shared Thursday by Trump on his Twitter account contained images specifically linked to a white nationalist group, VDARE, and an openly pro-fascist group called the “Lion Guard.”
VDARE calls itself “America’s immigration voice” and regularly publishes content from white supremacists like Jared Taylor and “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler on its website0 Its founder, Peter Brimelow, believes that American immigration policy is “Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America.”
You will not be surprised to learn that it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Lion Guard is a quasi-militia group formed during the 2016 election to counter protestors at Trump rallies. Its website prominently features this lion logo along with a quote from Benito Mussolini. Neither the website nor their Twitter page appears to have been updated since then, however.
The video was created by Twitter user @som3thingwicked, who claims he simply googled “Trump logo” and it produced the lion image, and thinks the real question is why Google is associating white supremacy with Trump?
For those asking me about lions.
I googled "trump logo png." It returned several images, which I recreated.
GOOGLE. TAGGED. THAT. LION. AS. MAGA.
If it's something else, it occurs to me the REAL question is: Why is GOOGLE associating white supremacist metadata with Trump/MAGA? pic.twitter.com/zfhxabZq6F
— SOMETHiNG WiCKËD (@som3thingwicked) August 29, 2019
It isn’t hard to figure out why.
Original reporting by Luke Barnes at ThinkProgress and Aaron Rupar at VOX.
