New York Magazine
By Jay Hathaway
February 27, 2016
Last
week, presidential candidate Donald Trump caused a minor stir by
retweeting someone with the Twitter handle @whitegenocideTM, which some
saw as making explicit the
connection between Trump and American white supremacists. But that’s
just one data point, right? A one-off thing that could have been an
intern’s mistake? Unfortunately, no: the data shows that 62 percent of
the accounts Trump has retweeted recently have white-supremacist
connections.
Marshall
Kirkpatrick, of social-media analytics company Little Bird, took a look
at the 21 people the Donald has blessed with his fantastic, luxurious
retweets this week,
and discovered that six of them follow major white-nationalist
accounts, and 13 of them follow multiple accounts that have used the
#whitegenocide hashtag.
Conclusion? “It turns out that Donald Trump mostly retweets white supremacists saying nice things about him.”
It’s
hard to separate cause from effect here. Is Trump riling up the white
nationalists by lending them his 5-million-follower megaphone whenever
they praise him? Or are
racists, who love Trump for his anti-immigration polemics, just more
likely than others to send our future hairpiece-in-chief the kind of
praise he likes to retweet?
Either way, Trump and white nationalism seem to be caught in a positive-feedback loop, each emboldening the other.
Although
being associated with @whitegenocideTM would likely hurt any other
candidate, it seems Trump’s national polling numbers are bulletproof. Is
that in spite of,
or because of, the things the white pride crowd loves about him?
Something to think about.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment