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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Trump did more than you suggest. He used well understood language (“when the looting starts the shooting starts” is a famous quote from a white supremacist) to encourage his supporters to murder/lynch blacks.

His campaign eventually started using Nazi imagery suggesting various opposition groups and protestors should be sent to concentration camps.

Facebook pulled the ad. Around the same time, he used Twitter to (successfully, apparently) incite lynchings.

Pulling a few Trump campaign ads was too little too late, and now people are boycotting Facebook.

Here is a link to a story about the ad. Don’t take my word for it: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/18/trump-ad-uses-nazi-symbol-...

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I think you're giving Trump too much credit. I find it difficult to believe Trump is highly educated about anything, much less esoteric quotes and symbols used by dead racist people.

He just parrots what he sees/hears and he spends a lot of time looking at far right content.

Can you name a place on the internet that regularly uses a red triangle as a racist symbol that Trump might have parroted this from?

Well the most racist stuff I've seen from him have been retweets so that would be my guess. Not sure how well twitter censors out that particular symbol.

Hitler didn’t have much of a web presence, and I guess whatever’s left of the Nazi party hasn’t set one up. However, people have scanned some of the nazi propaganda:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badg...

Also, at least when I was a kid, public grade schools covered WWII, and taught us about the triangles.

Here’s a story from the history channel:

https://www.history.com/news/pink-triangle-nazi-concentratio...

Red was reserved for political prisoners, and the LGBT movement co-opted the pink triangle. Good for them.

Have you seriously not heard of any of this? Are you not from the US, or have holocaust deniers been tampering with school curricula?

I'm from the US. We surely covered WWII. I don't recall triangles at all. That doesn't mean it wasn't covered, I do remember the star of David looking badges to mark Jews, which is technically two triangles.

I could be wrong, but Trump doesn't strike me as the kind of person watching a lot of the history channel. Or reading history books. Or reading anything at all really.

I feel like I'm being asked to believe that the guy who spent two years bragging about how great black people were doing economically, bragging about funding HBCUs more than any other administration, creating opportunity zones, and implementing criminal justice reform is a secret Nazi. Sure, he's loudly doing all these tangible good things for black people and won't shut up about it, but he's quietly letting the Nazis know he's really one of them.

Trump's audience when he talks about what he does for Black people are "moderate" whites that want to believe Trump isn't racist. He is though, he retweets white supremacist memes regularly and says them in speeches.

He also hires lots of white supremacists both in government and for his campaign work. Some of them have a lot more interest in the history than Trump does.

Look up Stephen Miller. Whether it was Miller specifically-- campaigns have a lot of staff. None of this stuff is conceived and directed by a single person.

You think his marketing team randomly chose from a selection of polygons to run as the primary image on a national ad campaign? The Trump administration loves their dog whistles.

If Trump got a swastika face tattoo and posted a video of himself goose stepping on the white house lawn, do you think we should see that, or should the media censor and hide that from us?

Are you asking me if I think Facebook should have to host that content? Naw, seems like a better fit for tiktok.

Perhaps it is giving Trump too much credit - the actual blame likely lies with the team running his campaign. All the same, it seems strangely coincidental that he keeps on stumbling into racist material and symbolism.

I mean yeah, it was just a coincidence he restarted his rallies on Juneteenth in Tulsa, OK, that he then moved under pressure/outcry. Also a coincidence he used a quote from a racist police chief, and also a coincidence he used a nazi triangle. I mean, sure, it is possible this is all just happenstance.

If in the future he starts talking about campaign bliztkriegs and having his voters celebrating at crystal night parties and his campaign printing "I voted" stickers of dancing people that look like Jim Crow, and then proceed to claim ignorance, just another 3 crazy coincidences, I'm gonna call bullshit all the same.

> used a nazi triangle

If anyone doubts that this was an intentional dog whistle to white supremacists: the first sentence of the ad with the nazi triangle had 14 words[1]. His campaign ran 88 [2] on the facebook pages for Trump, Pence, and Team Trump.

These are very well-known references used by white supremacists/neo-nazis they often use as dog whistles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_Precepts

> Trump did more than you suggest. He used well understood language (“when the looting starts the shooting starts” is a famous quote from a white supremacist) to encourage his supporters to murder/lynch blacks.

Yet somehow it's hard to find this quote in Google if you select range before the events.

Google returns lots of results from a variety of sources for that quote:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22when+the+looting+starts%2...

As expected, most of the results appear to be about the original use of the phrase in 1967 by the racist police chief of Miami Walter Headley.

That's why I told to select date range before, like 2010-2019.

My link did include a date range:

    &tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2019
    # urldecoded:
    tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:,cd_max:12/31/2019

While I didn't bother specifying cd_min, many results are within your range. From the first page of results from my link above:

(2018) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/08/07...

(2018) https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article1981602.htm...

(2014) https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/156908

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