The average New Zealander has been coached into believing Donald Trump is arrogant, an ineffective liar and a very poor leader. After watching Newshub, numbed brains will have absorbed that Trump is also a white supremacist.
Promoting anti-Trump sentiment is an ongoing NZ media smear campaign on behalf of their American compatriots driven by anti-Trump political sentiment.
Newshub contacted Christian Picciolini in Chicago this week to share his message that Trump is a white supremacist responsible for the nationwide BLM protests, attacks, killings and general unrest.
Picciolini said Trump is doing exactly what Picciolini himself did when he was leader of a Neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago.
Relevant sections of the interview are transcribed below.
AM Show:
White supremacist ideology is spreading into the mainstream and violent extremism is only going to get worse. At least that’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and now dedicates his life trying to get people out of these things. He’s written a book “Breaking Hate” which tackles the new culture of extremism which is all around us.
Picciolini:
I was recruited into America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead group when I was just 14 years old in 1987. I spent eight years as a member and also eventually as a leader. During that time I was the front man for two white power racist bands that toured the United States and Europe and in 1996 I started aah… my disengagement away from that movement.
Umm… but I want to say that prior to that, prior to 14 years old when I was recruited umm I was a normal kid. I came from a normal aah family. My parents are Italian American immigrants who came to the US in the mid-60s and when they arrived they were the victims of prejudice.
So, racism wasn’t something that was part of my family DNA in fact it wasn’t even something that I was raised on. It was something that I learned.
AM Show:
Why did you join? Why did they target you?
Picciolini:
You know, growing up I felt very isolated. I was bullied for who I was, I didn’t have very many friends growing up aah but I think the misnomer is that most people are attracted to the ideology and in fact I wasn’t attracted to the ideology, I was searching for a sense of identity, community and purpose and those are three things that are important to all of us.
But I had what I call potholes in my life’s journey. And potholes are anything like trauma, abuse, isolation, mental illness, privilege, poverty – all those things that can kind of keep us moving towards the fringes.
And on the fringes the narratives were flourishing and somebody found me. So, I was drawn more to the sense of identity and community and purpose at first, than I was the ideology – it was completely foreign to me.
AM Show:
What are these people like? What do they do to other people and what did you do? The worst things, what are some of the worst things that you and your mates did at the time?
Picciolini:
Well, I was involved in a lot of street fighting umm but mostly what lives on today that I was involved in 30 years ago was the propaganda that I was making.
I was making music that’s still available on the internet today no matter how much I try to have it removed. These things live forever. Aah… so, you know, life was… was challenging at that time.
I was in an environment for eight years where it was full of hate, not just hatred for other people but there was a lot of internal hatred.
These are people who didn’t have a sense of confidence. A sense of who they were or even a sense of who to… in a very healthy way deal with the challenges in their life. So as you can imagine there was a lot of ego, there was a lot of violence, there was a lot of verbal violence and aah there was a lot of activity that placed the blame on the problems that we experienced in our lives onto other people because it was easier to blame somebody else than it was to take responsibility ourselves.
AM Show:
Asked what role President Trump has to play and what to make of his response to the current movement and situation?
Picciolini:
Oh well I think that the president we have now is amplifying a lot of the polarisation aah that, you know, frankly we’ve experienced for 400 years.
Umm you know, he’s responsible in the sense that he is amplifying the messages that I put up 30 years ago.
He is, in many cases, saying almost identical things to what I believed 30 years ago. Aah but to be clear he didn’t start this. This was… these are forest fires that have existed for centuries in my country and what President Trump did was he kicked a bucket of gasoline over that… unified all those disparate sparks that already existed.
AM Show:
At the moment, while the world tries to address these ills and there’s genuine movement against it, the world also seems to be very sensitive and keen to point the finger and label people as being racist, and almost putting ideals in people’s heads that don’t exist, is that harmful to what you are trying to achieve?
Picciolini:
Well I think that certainly in some cases there can be an over reaction but I think in many of the cases, you know, people are pointing out very uncomfortable truths that people have been complicit with for a very, very long time. So, while it’s not appropriate to point the finger at anybody and you know, use the perjorative racist term aah you know to… to… cancel them or you know, to paint them in a hole there are a lot of things that people are doing that they may not themselves see as racist but are very racist.
Aah, you know we have an institu… systems and institutions here in the United States that have furthered racist ideologies for many, many years and I think that pointing them out now is causing a lot of people to be very defensive about.
As in any vendetta/smear campaign, the facts are irrelevant. The AM Show does not ask for examples but a Google search reveals Picciolini spreading his anti-Trump sentiment elsewhere. Trump recently retweeted a video showing Florida retirement village supporters which was withdrawn after attention was drawn to the offending words “white power”. The offending tweet was deleted.
“In one exchange — eight seconds into the two-minute video — a white man holding a sign that says “Make America Sane Again,” a reference to Trump’s campaign slogan, yells: “Where’s your white hood?”
In response, a white man driving a golf cart with signs reading “Trump 2020” and “America First” yells back “white power.“
The tweet that indicates Trump is racist? But Picciolini has more vague accusations about Trump’s systemic racism.
“This hasn’t been the first time that the president has tweeted something that has come from a white supremacist or that has had a white supremacist message, whether it’s talking about a conspiracy theory that’s connected to white genocide or whether it’s using pejorative language to describe other people,” Picciolini said.
“What is intentional, I believe, is the goal to instill fear. We’re seeing a lot more language that is racist, especially with the use of social media, and he is emboldening that kind of language through his tweets.”
Picciolini is deluded. There is no evidence that Trump is a white supremacist, racist or that he instils fear. Instilling fear is a successful BLM tactic. Examples please, Mr Picciolini?
Emotive tales of “400 years of racism”, “forest fires that existed for centuries” and “Trump kicking over a can of gasoline” are colourful, but where are the facts? Any diligent journalist worth their salt would have demanded them. But of course, impartiality in NZ journalism is mostly non-existent and the AM team in this interview did not deviate from their pre-ordained script which was to accuse Trump of being a white supremacist.
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