Photo: Andrew Mears/ AFP
Thank God for Donald J. Trump,” cried National Policy Institute director Richard Spencer into the microphone.
Spencer, 37, has a boyish, straitlaced look about him. With his well-tailored suit and a nicely kempt undercut, he’d meld perfectly into the swarms of youthful think tank employees trotting down Massachusetts Avenue. But NPI is no ordinary Washington think tank. Founded by an heir to a conservative publishing fortune, it drew white nationalists and sympathizers from around the country—and at least one from Canada—to its innocuously named “Identity Politics” conference a couple of days after Donald Trump dominated the field on Super Tuesday. For $45, I snagged the last ticket designated for millennials.
It is the rise of the bombastic Republican frontrunner that brought this amalgam of aggrieved crusaders together for an evening of cocktails, appetizers, and songs of praise to the candidate who’s inspired them to dip a toe into the stream of establishment politics.
There’s another hate group tackling Target for daring to be inclusive, the AFA (American Family Association):
The American Family Association, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been sending cisgender men into women’s restrooms at the retail chain.
Previously, the AFA had organized a boycott of Target, which allows customers and employees to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. The policy is a slap back at North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law prohibiting transgender people from using the appropriate facilities for their identity, although the law applies only to government buildings, not private-sector companies.
The group, which contends Target’s policy opens the bathroom floodgates to sexual predators, claims to have enlisted over 1 million people to join its boycott.
Sandy Rios, AFA’s director of governmental affairs, revealed its new anti-LGBT tactic in a Monday radio interview with Breitbart News.
“We’ve already had people testing this, going into Targets and men trying to go into bathrooms. There is absolutely no barrier,” she told host Stephen Bannon, who said “decent, hard-working people who don’t want their 4-year-old daughter to have to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress.”
“Absolutely no barrier”. I think that one gets filed under “no shit, Sherlock.” There’s never been anything stopping anyone from going into any public lav. You don’t even need to play dress up, just walk right in. You’d think that might have occurred to the genius watchdogs of uStates morality, but apparently it just slid right by them.
