After appearing at a caucus venue in Nevada on Tuesday where Donald Trump suddenly made an impromptu appearance, charging up supporters, talk radio host Glenn Beck expressed his fury at the behavior of Trump supporters, likening them to Nazis and characterizing them as “brown shirts.”
Beck wrote on Facebook that Trump’s supporters are “some of the nastiest people I have ever been with … We have their hate and rage on tape. Others around them were embarrassed for them. It was scary and sad.” He added, “I believe Trump, whether he knows it or not, is grooming brown shirts. Don’t believe me, go to a caucus.”
Beck’s views are not new; as New York Magazine reported in late January, “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.”
Some noted white supremacists have supported Trump, including KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who told The Washington Post that Trump was the “best of the lot.”
Richard Spencer, the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, told The New Yorker, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but added Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have—that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon. I think he is the one person who can tap into it.”
But as David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, noted after National Review devoted an entire issue to denouncing Trump, “It drew a lot of reaction. And I must say, I was surprised by how many of the responses, especially on Twitter, were openly racist and anti-Semitic.”
Conservative writer Ben Domenech noted as far back as last September: