Former President Barack Obama took the unusual step of specifically calling out politicians who have refused to publicly and unequivocally disavow white nationalists during a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Friday.

“It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t target certain groups of people based on what they look like or they prey. We’re Americans, we’re supposed to stand up to bullies, not follow them,” Obama said. “We’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.”

It wasn’t the only time Obama directly called out the white nationalist threat. He also specifically mentioned Charlottesville, saying that one of the most important reasons to vote was that it gives young people the power “to make sure that white nationalists don’t feel emboldened to march with their hoods on or off in Charlottesville in the middle of the day.”


One of the main sources of frustration and anger that anti-fascist counter-protesters exhibit towards the political establishment — particularly Democrats and more centrist media pundits — has been the refusal by many to take the white nationalist threat as seriously as they do. In wake of Unite the Right 2 for instance, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Brian Stelter argued that the real threat was the “incivility” by Antifa towards counter-protesters, a narrative not backed up by many journalists on the ground that day.

Hey Jake! Reporter who spent all weekend wedged up against anti-fascists who probably didn’t want press there, but were pretty uniformly chill. You know who shoved media indiscriminately? Police. https://t.co/vOIeKR1Yrm — Kelly Weill (@KELLYWEILL) August 13, 2018

However, Obama’s comments were much more clearly aimed at the Republican Party, which has adopted a certain tolerance for white nationalist elements within its ranks. Republican Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has repeatedly parroted white nationalist talking points and refused to apologize for them, while House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) has evaded condemning him. Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate for the Virginia Senate seat, has a history of white nationalist rhetoric. On Thursday, Media Matters revealed that Everett Corley, a Republican candidate for a state House seat in Kentucky, had appeared on a white nationalist podcast. A self-described neo-Nazi is running for Congress as a Republican in Illinois after 20,000 GOP voters selected him as their party’s nominee.

White nationalists are also trying to emulate James Allsup, an individual with ties to the far-right Identity Evropa, who currently works for the local Republican Party in Whitman County, Washington. “We can’t all be [neo-Nazi] Andrew Anglin,” one white nationalist podcaster said recently. “But 10,000 of us can be James Allsup…the cumulative effect of all of those little influences can really change things. I think that’s the next step for us.”


The sympathy runs all the way up the top. In his recent book on the Trump administration, Bob Woodward chronicles how President Donald Trump said that his decision to condemn neo-Nazis in wake of the violence at Charlottesville last August was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”