Travis McAdams, former Research and Program Director of the Montana Human Rights Network, will be the guest speaker at the 20th Annual Martin Luther King Celebration sponsored by the Bitterroot Human Rights Alliance in Hamilton on Monday, January 16th. The event is sponsored by the Bitterroot Human Rights Alliance and is set for 7:00 p. m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church located at 600 South 3rd Street in Hamilton. McAdams will be addressing the white supremacy movement, its underlying ideas and the role it is playing in local and national politics.
Some things that McAdams will be specifically addressing are the latest actions by part-time Whitefish resident and White Supremacist Richard Spencer, the targeting of Jewish people and human rights activists in Montana by Neo-Nazis and the appointment by President-elect Trump of White Nationalist Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist.
Richard Spencer is President of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “ an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” It was founded in 2005 by William Regnery and Samuel T. Francis, in conjunction with Louis R. Andrews. According to Wikepedia, the institute is “a white nationalist, white supremacist think tank in Arlington, Virginia. It presents a lobby for white nationalism and seeks to provide a ‘so-called alt-right’ ‘intellectual vanguard’.” Spencer is founder of the blog Alternative Right.
McAdams calls Spencer “the poster boy for white nationalism” and suggests that he has simply sugar coated the hard core philosophy of the Ku Klux Klan and ‘skinheads’ to make it “more palatable” for ordinary people.
“You won’t hear any racial slurs, no violent messages, like the Klan and the Skinheads, but he has simply changed the words from ‘White Power’ to ‘White Pride’,” said McAdams. “He’s very good at playing the public relations game. He’s very smart tactically.”
McAdams points to the literature drop in Missoula recently that targeted the Jewish community as an example of the kind of activity that is simply not acceptable and he praises the response that it drew from others in the community who came out to denounce it. He said we are experiencing a spike in this kind of activity across the nation and it should be resisted.
“It’s very important for communities to respond to this sort of thing,” he said.
He believes that Trump’s campaign rhetoric is a good example of how very hard core, “marginal” views about white supremacy are moving into the mainstream discussion and how it influences the discussion. He believes that by appointing Steve Bannon as his chief strategist Trump has not only moved the white supremacy movement from the margins into the mainstream, but has put it in charge of the White House.