Hours After Trump Finally Denounced White Supremacists… A Racist Tweet

Late Monday night, just hours after (finally) delivering his “too little, too late” condemnation of “racism…white supremacists…and hate groups”—which critics noted appeared dispassionate and forced—President Donald Trump re-tweeted a message from Jack Posobiec, a well-known right-wing racist and conspiracy theorist, who raised objections to the media’s focus on the rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday by an alleged neo-Nazi member who killed one person and injured dozens of others.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Posobiec is well-known in alt-right circles. He was a vocal believer that top Democrats were involved in a child sex trafficking ring at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, and that the Democratic National Committee was behind the death of former staffer Seth Rich.” NewsWeek reports that Posobiec is “currently helping organize multiple alt-right rallies similar to the one in Charlottesville in cities throughout the U.S. this coming weekend” and “has in the past defended white supremacist Richard Spencer.”

As documented by the Huffington Post‘s Ed Mazza reports, the choice to re-tweet Posobiec was immediately seen by critics as a move “to deflect attention from his belated response to white supremacist violence, but also as an implicit effort to draw attention to crime within the African-American community.”