What Trump's Election Means for America and American Values Coalition
It was always a long road.
American Values Coalition was founded three years ago to address the problems of political extremism and misinformation on the right side of American politics. We founded AVC as a 501c3 organization because we understood that the problems we're addressing are deeply ingrained and won't be solved by winning elections. As I often say when asked about the work of AVC, this is a generational project.
This Summer, I was interviewed by Michelle Boorstein for The Washington Post. She asked me why I wasn't more focused on the problem of a potential second Trump presidency. Reporting on my answer, Boorstein wrote,
“Because [Trump] opened this can of worms, our mission will still be necessary no matter who wins in November,” said Napp Nazworth, an evangelical political scientist who leads one of the new groups working to combat religious extremism among fellow conservative Christians. He believes focusing on Trump right now would be counterproductive.
“This isn’t to downplay how deeply concerning another Trump presidency would be. I do think it’s a tremendous danger, and I’m worried about it. But this a generational project.”
So this election was never destined to be the end of AVC's work even if Trump had lost. But Trump's election does signal a rough road ahead. Right-wing extremists will be emboldened. J6 insurrectionists will be pardoned. Companies, including media companies, will become less inclined to oppose the extremists, in order to curry favor with the new administration. Content moderation on social media sites, already weakened, will become even weaker. One source of disinformation — Putin — will have a fanboy in the White House.
While the challenge is great, our resolve is greater still. We'll continue to help heal relationships broken by hyper-polarization in families, friendships, and churches. We'll promote pluralism. We'll work together, as we always have, with the centrist coalitions that have formed to rebuild civil society. And as our mission statement says, we'll continue "growing a community of Americans empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy."
Event
On November 18, 7pm, we’ll be at Wheaton College. Please join us if you’re able!
Additional Reading
The Atlantic: “X Is a White-Supremacist Site: Elon Musk has made one of Twitter’s most glaring problems into a core feature on X.”
has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.
But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.
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