Americans who consider Donald Trump one hot mess as a presidential candidate need to meet Robert Whitaker, a guy who just might make The Donald look like a statesman.
Mr. Whitaker is the American Freedom Party’s candidate for president, and his campaign falls a few waves short of the beach. If you’re an immigrant coming to America, you’d better be white. If you’re what Mr. Whitaker and the AFP euphemistically call “nonwhite,” forget it. You’re not welcome here.
You thought Mr. Trump’s attitude toward immigration — let’s build a wall and keep the Mexicans out — was isolationist? Mr. Whitaker doesn’t stop there. He’d build a wall, figuratively, around the lower 48 plus Hawaii and Alaska. He doesn’t want anybody coming to the United States who isn’t as white as he is.
A country founded by immigrants, a nation considered the big melting pot, has a presidential candidate who would close America to anyone he views as tainted with impurities.
If that’s the load-bearing portion of his platform, he’s living in a house of cards. Didn’t we resolve that whole “master race” issue in World War II?
I had heard of the AFP, but never realized the degree of its extremism until a recent trip to visit family in Alabama. My relatives’ phone machine recorded a robocall touting Mr. Whitaker’s candidacy and outlining his ideas about “nonwhites.”
Here are a few of the robocall’s points:
● “Asia for the Asians, Africa for the Africans, but white countries for everybody?”
● “Flooding all and only white countries with third world overflow is white genocide.”
● “If you support the present policy of flooding all-white countries with third world nonwhites, you are anti-white.”
Mr. Whitaker and the AFP sent this vile message to 180,000 telephones in Alabama. The same sentiments were expressed in earlier robocall blitzes in two other states where he wants to be on the presidential ballot next year, Idaho and Mississippi.
While the Constitution guarantees Mr. Whitaker the right to display his public contempt for our nation’s history and values, there is no requirement that the media help him. So the dilemma becomes whether to ignore him or swallow hard and let him betray his ignorance by giving him the forum he craves.
“We use robocalls,” he explains on his website, “because the media blocks our message. What they call diversity has nothing to do with real diversity. What our rulers call diversity just means chasing down white people.”
He pledges to keep his drumbeat going “no matter how much the anti-white media slanders us with hate words like ‘racist’ and ‘supremacist’ while at the same time ignoring our actual message.”
America today, he says, is a country filled with white self-hatred, and that, he declares, is “sick.”
My relatives in Alabama expressed the hope that their next-door neighbor, an engineering professor, didn’t get the same robocall. He’s busy enriching young minds at a nearby university. He came to the United States from India.
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that Alabama is one of the states the Whitaker campaign is targeting to secure a place on the presidential ballot next fall. While visiting, I learned of a decision by the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency to close 31 driver’s license offices around the state, ostensibly for budgetary reasons.
Eight counties with the highest percentage of registered African-American voters — counties that are 75 percent black or greater — will no longer offer the test for a new driver's license. Citizens will have to travel elsewhere to find an agency.
Alabama requires a voter to have a driver’s license or photo ID to vote. See the connection? Hillary Clinton weighed in on the controversy, calling the plan a “blast from the Jim Crow past.”
One other thing. Alabama last week also closed all three state parks that have served the “Black Belt” for generations but are suddenly expendable for revenue reasons. Alabama now has no state parks south of Birmingham and west of I-65, and that’s a big chunk of the state.
Even if Alabama’s financial woes are the excuse for the cutbacks, the blatant inequity of it all is stunning, and might even explain Robert Whitaker’s eagerness to win a spot on the ballot.
He’s upset because the news media won’t help him get his message out? He needs to be careful what he wishes for. It’s out.
Thomas Walton is the retired editor and vice president of The Blade. His column appears every other Monday. His commentary, “Life As We Know It,” can be heard each Monday at 5:44 p.m. on WGTE-FM 91. Contact him at: twalton@theblade.com