Trump’s defence of statues echoes right-wing rhetoric

“Where are you going to stop it?’ Gingrich said. “You want to say, ‘What if you weren’t sensitive enough to the Holocaust, we should take down all the statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?’ You could make an argument for that.”

“You could make an argument for Thomas Jefferson and George Washington,” MacCallum said. “Are you going to change the name of the Washington Monument?”

Gingrich noted that both former presidents were slave owners.

“Absolutely. That’s my point,” MacCallum said.

Trump’s statements also mirrored a post Monday by the publisher of The Daily Stormer, a notorious neo-Nazi website.

“These ‘protests’ are happening across the country,” Andrew Anglin wrote after a Confederate monument was taken down Monday in Durham, North Carolina. “And I guarantee you, they are going to go to Washington, and they are going to demand that the Washington Monument be torn down. They might even try to pull it down. Because George Washington owned slaves. More importantly, he was a white man who built something.”

Anglin’s site takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. The site includes sections called “Jewish Problem” and “Race War.”

Google cancelled the domain name registration of The Daily Stormer on Monday after Anglin published a post mocking the woman killed in a deadly attack at the Charlottesville rally, calling her “fat” and “childless.”

Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Trump’s defence of statues echoes right-wing rhetoric

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