This is news.
The November 2nd, 2016 Politico story White nationalists plot Election Day show of force : KKK, neo-Nazis and militias plan to monitor urban polling places and suppress the black vote concludes with a truly explosive, deeply disturbing revelation concerning the American Freedom Party and the Trump campaign.
As Ben Schreckinger’s Politico story describes,
“William Johnson, chairman of the American Freedom Party and an advocate of deporting nonwhites from the United States, said his party members are working through Trump’s operation rather than organizing their own efforts.
“We have some of our members that are doing poll watching, but they’re not doing it as American Freedom Party members,” he said. “They’re doing it through the Trump campaign.”
“We have a lot of people that are involved with the get-out-the-vote through the various Trump organizations,” said the Los Angeles-based Johnson, who added that the party’s California members are focused on aiding the Trump campaign in Nevada.”
The AFP is a white supremacist political party with deep neo-Nazi roots that supports ethnic cleansing, denies historic genocidal violence against Native Americans, and promotes Holocaust denial.
The AFP, which calls Donald Trump it’s “great white hope”, sells a novel about a coming race war in America that will lead to mass ethnic cleansing.
Will the Trump campaign deny it ?
The American Freedom Party might well be the most toxic political entity in America today. It’s a fetid miasma that represents a confluence of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and anti-Semitic currents on the American far-right.
Every one of the six leaders of the AFP has his own, uniquely horrible profile on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center :
William Daniel Johnson
Paul Fromm
Kevin B. MacDonald
Tom Sunic
James Kelso
James Edwards
A seasoned corporate lawyer, William D. Johnson's past positions have included a 1985 proposal to deport all American citizens of child-bearing age who had an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood” or more than 1/8 "Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood". The Politico story suggests Johnson still harbors that ambition.
But there’s good circumstantial evidence to support Johnson’s claims, that his AFP is working directly with the Trump campaign. I have detailed various aspects of that case in a few recent posts here on the Daily Kos :
Trump Advisors Flock To Radio Network That Ran David Duke Fundraiser
Trump links to white supremacist group that helped inspire Dylan Roof Massacre
And earlier on the Huffington Post :
Trump Campaign Tied To Second Leader of White Nationalist Party
From Inside RNC, White Nationalist Radio Broadcasts Call For Execution of Clinton
As I detail in that first Huffington Post story, the trail goes back as far as April 2016, when the Trump campaign granted American Freedom Party director James Edwards VIP press credentials so that Edwards could broadcast his wildly racist Political Cesspool radio show from inside a Memphis Trump rally.
Edwards then participated in a March 1st., 2016 radio show interview with Donald Trump, Jr., on the Liberty Roundtable talk radio show. In July, James Edwards joined Liberty Roundtable show host Sam Bushman at the 2016 Republican National Convention (see second Huffington Post story) from where Bushman was live-broadcasting his Liberty Roundtable show.
As I describe in my second linked Daily Kos story, James Edwards is also a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which “opposes all efforts to mix the races” and has been credited by Time, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other major media venues with having helped inspire Dylann Roof’s Summer 2015 mass-murder of nine African-American members of a Charleston, South Carolina church prayer group, in what Roof has described as an attempt to trigger a race war.
In my two linked Daily Kos stories, I cover the involvement of Sam Bushman and James Edwards in pro-Trump robocalls and radio ads aired in 2016 by the American Freedom Party.