THEIR MASTER'S VOICE:

[T]rumpism is very likely a kind of gateway drug for some people for violent extremism. It offers an ideational set of preconditions off of which the radicalizing individual can spring.

But Trumpism doesn't simply provide--like certain Islamisms--an ideational platform on which radicalization can take place. It also provides key aspects of the crucial social networks for very large numbers of people. Nazis and white supremacists have always been able to find each other online, but unless you visited their particular corners of the web, they had very little way to reach you. They were a relatively small group of people speaking almost entirely to themselves.

Trump has changed that. Now white supremacists and alt-righters are a small group of people in a giant stadium, doing the wave in the bleachers with Sieg Heils. Everyone in the stadium gets to see them, particularly because the Trump campaign often puts them on the Jumbotron by retweeting them or refusing to repudiate them. Notoriously, in January, Trump retweeted a message from a user with the Twitter handle "@WhiteGenocideTM," a reference to a widespread white supremacist meme. Later in the campaign, Trump also refused for days to conclusively repudiate David Duke's endorsement of his candidacy.

What's more, if you follow Donald Trump's own Twitter feed, you inevitably get exposed to a steady diet of the hardest-core white supremacists as they fawningly reply to him. Even if you don't follow Trump, you see those people attacking the journalists and commentators you do follow. And if you attend Trump's rallies or watch clips of them online, you can find other Trump supporters chanting slogans like "Jew-S-A." A recent video shows one rally attendee in Cleveland coaching another through calling reporters members of the "Lügenpresse"--a Nazi phrase meaning "lying press."

So all of a sudden, huge numbers of people are potentially subject to the influence of peer groups they didn't even know they had. More perniciously still, the radicals get to approach this very large new audience through the cleansing lens of an apparently mainstream political candidacy and party. That Trump supporter taught to shout "Lügenpresse" presumably didn't know that he was screaming a Nazi slur; he was just following Trump's lead, and the lead of those around him, in jeering at the "dishonest media."

How big is the amplifying effect of Trumpism for white supremacy? This week, the name David Duke was trending on Twitter as a result of Duke's appearance at a debate for a Louisana seat in the U.S. Senate. When he announced his Senate bid in July, Duke explicitly linked his candidacy to the Trump campaign, saying that he had been inspired to run by Trump and was "overjoyed" to see Trump "embrace most of the issues that I've championed for years." As of December 2015, the white supremacist website Stormfront was upgrading its servers in response to its "steady increase" in traffic driven by Trump's then-new prominence on the national stage. Its traffic, we regret to report, currently outperforms that of Lawfare by a factor of several times.

There's a simple measure for whether our basic theory here is, in a general sense, right: If it is, we will see a significant spike in white supremacist violence over the next few years. The Trump campaign has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate. If our collective understanding of the process of violent radicalization is correct, the result will be blood.

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