According to a report in the The Associated Press “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign are expressing ideas similar to those espoused by white supremacists, legal, media and civil rights experts say. In addition, the experts said Wednesday, white supremacists are using the 2016 presidential elections to attempt to control the culture of politics.”

And the evangelical leadership’s reaction? Total support of Trump. Is this surprising?

The Falwell family is a leading family of bigots. Their white supremacist loyalties go way back.

Falwell senior was a rabid segregationist. I knew him and while talking to him in his office before I preached from his pulpit before I’d fled the religious right I heard Falwell talk about wanting to shoot gay men “like I’d shoot my dog if he did that!”

Yes, Falwell, like his son was a bigoted pig of a man. Period.

It is Trump’s outright hate of the other that has attracted the white supremacist evangelical movement to him.

As noted by the Nation magazine in his obituary

Falwell senior railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called “values” issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism. As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?” “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.” Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

Today Jerry Falwell Jr and many other many other white supremacists such as Franklin Graham, James Dobson and the KKK, see this as their last stand for controlling the country.

According to the AP story, Trump has flirted with far right white hate groups led by the KKK and people like Falwell Jr. groups and their ideals through some of his campaign statements and platforms, including building a wall between the U.S.-Mexico border; a proposed ban on Muslims entering the country; planning to join Marco Rubio at what they consider an anti-LGBT event in Orlando on the two-month anniversary of the Pulse massacre; and the failure to immediately denounce the endorsement of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

After all Falwell Jr begged his student body to openly carry loaded weapons in his college to protect themselves from Muslims. Angelo Carusone, executive vice president of Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group, noted that Trump has retweeted posts from white supremacist accounts on Twitter.

Sophie Bjork-James, a Vanderbilt University lecturer and expert in white supremacist social movements, said white nationalists are attempting to increase their numbers through Trump’s campaign.

“They are organizing online to rebrand to respectable politics,” she said. “Instead of being racist, they try to be respectable, but they are also using conspiracy theories to control the media through their social media handles for white nationalist ideas.”

According to Carrie Sheffield a political writer for Salon, the tilt to the white right/Falwell hate groups is only going to continue:

By naming Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon as his top campaign executive, Trump is taking a detractive, rather than additive approach to voter engagement, even among would-be allies on the right. Recently, Breitbart News has taken numerous shots at establishment figures like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who could have helped Trump if he had been interested in governing instead of bluster. But Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to the election has shown, as described in “The Art of War,” that he didn’t care about winning. That would have meant doing the hard work of cultivating party unity rather than division. Trump stubbornly thought he could win without shoring up the GOP, and this strategy is on the brink of failure.

Trump is choosing to stick with hate leaders like Falwell Jr and of other xenophobes by going with the Breitbart path. This is suicide for the Republicans, but racial purity for the whites like Falwell, worth dying for, or worth killing off the old GOP for.

As Pew Research and other demographic researchers have shown, the United States is on its way to becoming a majority “minority” country, with the proportion of white voters, including those of the Breitbart News audience, shrinking by the year. Millennials are 42 percent nonwhite, and the majority of babies born today are from minority groups.

Trump’s appeal to the white supremacists such as the evangelicals voting for him is no accident. Trump’s father (like Jerry Falwell Jr’s dad, was an outright bigot.

As noted in the New York Times,

President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals. … I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military. To prove the discrimination, blacks were repeatedly dispatched as testers to Trump apartment buildings to inquire about vacancies, and white testers were sent soon after. Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental. A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.

Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has engaged in a heated overt and dedicated courtship with the racist white nationalist movement represented by Falwell Jr and others, that is unprecedented in recent American political history. That effort has taken on new life with Trump’s hiring of Breitbart News chief Stephen Bannon. That courtship is of a piece with his love affair with white gun lobby groups who think the 2nd Amendment is a call to arms against the government.

Bannon oversaw Breitbart News’ attempts to normalize and embrace the white nationalist movement. As the Southern Poverty Law Center noted, Breitbart “has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas.”

As Media Matters notes “White nationalist themes have been at the center of Trump’s campaign since its inception.”

He began his campaign by smearing Mexican immigrants as violent criminals and rapists and later called for a ban on Muslim immigration, moves which endeared him to his growing white nationalist support. When Trumpattacked the Mexican heritage of an American-born judge and smeared the family of a fallen Muslim-American soldier, his white nationalist fans cheered. Trump also initially refused to condemn the support of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Media Matters study describes how white nationalists haven’t only praised Trump from afar: They’ve rubbed elbows with the campaign. Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted white supremacist messages and accounts, such as “WhiteGenocideTM.” Trump surrogates have directly courted white nationalists by giving interviews to white nationalist media outlets. A “pro-white” radio host received press credentials to cover a Trump rally and the Republican National Convention. And Trump selected the leader of a white nationalist political party to be a convention delegate (he resigned following media exposure).

The following is a history of the Trump campaign’s disturbing relationship with the white nationalist movement.

White Nationalist Leaders Are Supporting Trump, Who See Him As Their “Last Stand”

White Nationalists Have Praised Trump And His Actions Throughout The Campaign

Trump And His Campaign Have Had Disturbing Interactions With White Nationalists

White Nationalists Say Trump Has Helped Them Grow Their Movement

David Duke: “Voting Against Donald Trump At This Point Is Really Treason To Your Heritage.” David Duke is a white supremacist radio host and former Ku Klux Klan wizard. He is currently running for the U.S. Senate and cited Trump as an inspiration for his run. [BuzzFeed, 2/25/16; Media Matters, 3/1/16, 7/22/16]

“Pro-White” Radio Host James Edwards: “Trump Will Be The First Republican Nominee That I Have Ever Voted For.” James Edwards is the host of the “pro-white” radio program The Political Cesspool.

Hate Publication Leader Kevin MacDonald: “Trump Is Saying What White Americans Have Been Actually Thinking For A Very Long Time.” The Southern Poverty Law Center described Kevin MacDonald as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic” who “published a trilogy that supposedly ‘proves’ that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 8/18/16; Media Matters, 8/27/15]

Neo-Nazi Site Daily Stormer: “Vote For The First Time In Our Lives For The One Man Who Actually Represents Our Interests.” The Daily Stormer is a neo-Nazi website headed by Andrew Anglin that has endorsed Trump and is enthusiastically supporting his campaign. The website regularly defends Adolf Hitler, attacks “kikes,” and has a section documenting the purported “Jewish Problem.” [Media Matters, 8/27/15]

Hate Group Leader Jared Taylor: “Trump May Be The Last Hope For A President Who Would Be Good For White People.” The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that Taylor “is the founder of the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, which, despite its pseudo-academic polish, regularly publishes proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. Taylor also hosts a conference every other year where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 8/18/16; Media Matters, 8/27/15]

Conclusion:

In the same way that the country is asking Republican leaders why they have not repudiated Trump — say after he called for the killing of Hillary Clinton or sided with Putin against America, or mocked the gold star family of a fallen soldier — so too we can ask why magazines such as Christianity Today and the evangelical establishment has not called on Falwell Jr and the other white evangelical supremacists to disavow Trump.

Maybe the editors at CT haven’t because with polls saying that 73 percent of evangelicals are voting for Trump the evangelical establishment at the big churches and publications, colleges and the rest know they are now openly leading a racist hate group and (post-Trump) can’t pretend otherwise.

The mask has slipped. Evangelicals now are the leaders and faithful foot soldiers of the white supremacist hate movement, by any name. With 73 percent still saying they will vote for Trump we now know who they are.

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace