The Alt-Right Gets its Marching Orders to Go After a Different Religious Minority

I am not much for the term “Alt-Right” because it implies that neo-Nazis somehow become new, different, interesting and edgy when they get a Twitter account and express their support for Donald Trump. In reality, it’s the same tired old neo-Nazi crap, complete with the cowardly, anonymous intimidation that White Supremacists have been practicing for decades.

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And just like White Supremacists from time immemorial, their favorite targets for a long time have been the Jews. If you tangle with one of these people on Twitter, they will inevitably call you Jewish pretty much no matter what (it happens to me all the time and I’m zero per cent Jewish). But now Tom Tancredo, writing in the modern day Der Stürmer wants you to know that the biggest problem might not really be the Jews after all. It might just be (cue scary music) the Mormons.

The media is suddenly full of stories on Trump’s “Mormon problem.” According to the mainstream media, Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants in his foreign policy speech kicked open a hornets’ nest of Mormon concerns about “religious tolerance.”

The truth is more simple, as is often the case in politics, and it has nothing to do with religious freedom as practiced by Americans under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

It is an open secret in Washington, D.C. that the Mormon church supports open borders and lax enforcement of immigration laws. Many Mormon politicians have been supporting amnesty and open borders for decades. When I was in Congress I had a confrontation with former Utah Senator Robert Bennett over his sponsorship of an amendment to exempt religious institutions from a Sanctuary City bill establishing penalties for harboring illegal aliens. It turned out he did it at the request of his church leaders. Mormon church support for John McCain in his Arizona Republican primary race is also due in large part to his open borders record and his challenger’s strong criticism of McCain’s hypocrisy on border security.

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The religious bigotry continues on in this vein for several more paragraphs; if you are interested, you can read it for yourself.

I would suspect that the reason Trump’s support with Mormon voters is weaker than those enjoyed by previous GOP nominees has nothing to do with the LDS church telling them to oppose all candidates who are immigration hardliners. I suspect that a large part of it comes from the fact that every Mormon I have known has considered living a life of public decency is a significant part of their witness to the world, and Trump’s persona is the opposite of public decency. Of course, I don’t make the bigoted assumption that Mormons are mindless automatons who take orders from a shadowy secret council, so the most I can really say with any confidence is that each voter who opposes Trump has his own sincerely-held reasons for doing so.

The explanation offered by Tancredo is short on actual facts but is of course long on standard-fare appeals to bigotry against a religious minority, including: 1. Claims that the group wields wildly disproportionate political power due to underhanded lobbying efforts, 2. References to decisions made behind closed doors by secret councils who send out secret marching orders to all members of the conspiracy, 3. Claims that the group has ultimate loyalty to a foreign power that is attempting to undermine the sovereignty of [whatever nation the neo-Nazi in question lives in], and so on and so on. These claims have been made against the Jews by the “alt-Right” of their day for the entire duration of written history; now it gets to be the Mormons’ turn for daring to refuse to bow the knee to Baal.

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