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| Hillary Clinton; Donald Trump; Angela Merkel (Credit: Reuters/Chris Bergin/Brian Snyder/Stefanie |
Donald Trump has a new obsession: comparing Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. During a Monday speech, Trump denounced the “massive immigration” to Germany under Merkel, for which he blames crime rising “to levels that no one thought would they would ever see.” He followed up this speech with press releases and a hashtag aimed at equating Clinton and Merkel.I have only had a vague sense of this until now. It's very disturbing:
The choice is an odd one on its surface because most Americans don’t have an opinion about Merkel, even when they know who she is. But as Alice Ollstein of Think Progress persuasively argued on Wednesday, the meme makes more sense when one considers that white supremacists definitely know who Merkel is, because they hate her:
To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” an “anti-White traitor,” and “a patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked, in articles about Merkel, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”
It’s yet another example of how Trump is mainstreaming white supremacist sentiment. But by making two women the center of an attack, he is also highlighting the way that antifeminism and white supremacy are tied into each other, since people in alt-right, white supremacist circles like to blame feminism for what they see as the “decline” of the white race.
“A new genre of declinist literature, ranging from anxious to apocalyptic, has appeared to warn of the coming population implosion and the loss of Europe to more fertile, faithful Muslims,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in her 2010 book “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.” She cites Mark Steyn’s“America Alone” and Pat Buchanan’s “The Death of the West” as books that raise the alarm about “Westerners” and their supposedly low birth rates. Both books focus heavily on blaming women for this purported decline.
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Because of the antifeminist angle, this argument has really taken root in antichoice circles, as well.
“The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America’s culture warriors tell anxious Europeans,” Kathryn Joyce wrote in the Nation in 2008, “isn’t ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of ‘antifamily’ permissiveness — contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women’s liberation and careers, ‘selfish’ secularism and gay rights — enabling ‘decadent’ white couples to neglect their reproductive duties.”