‘Stump for Trump’ Surrogates Promote The Donald on Neo-Nazi Show

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The fact that you will often now see the words “Donald Trump” in the same headline as “Nazi,” “fascist,” “neo-Nazi,” “white supremacist,” “white nationalist,” or “racist” says a lot about this election. Here’s another one of those stories. Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson (a.k.a., the “‘Stump for Trump’ girls”) gained national media attention as two YouTube stars who vivaciously expressed their love for Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. They have subsequently been booked to appear on TV news programs to talk about the election and The Donald, in segments that sometimes fly completely off the rails. One such example is an interview on CNN during which they promoted the fringe conspiracy theory that Marco Rubio is a covert homosexualist. The two female, African-American, full-time Trump supporters have also become part-time surrogates, firing up crowds at some Trump campaign events, and continuing to make the media rounds to push the case for the Republican frontrunner. One of their most recent media appearance was on a platform hosted by a Holocaust-denying, Hitler-praising, conspiracy-theory-mongering neo-Nazi. In an 18-minute “exclusive” audio interview with John Friend of American Free Press posted on Wednesday (flagged by liberal media-watchdog Media Matters), Hardaway and Richardson talked Trump, jobs, and immigration, among other topics. “These people been in office for years and haven’t done anything,” Hardaway told Friend. “They are okay with illegal people running in our country, and we don’t even know these people.” “Exactly,” Richardson weighed in. The problem here isn’t as much what the Diamond and Silk duo said. It’s pretty standard, anti-undocumented-immigrant, anti-GOP-elite stuff (perhaps more extreme) that you expect to hear coming from the people who go on TV, or radio, or podcasts to talk up how Trump will surely Make America Great Again. The problem is the interviewer, whose views would prove toxic—at the very least for surrogates of a campaign that wasn’t so admired or enthusiastically supported by white nationalists. You can easily Google for the far-right journalistic output of John Friend, who the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly called out as a “vir­u­lent anti-Semite and Holo­caust denier.” Friend’s bit on how the “Jews did 9/11” speaks fascistic volumes for itself. But the clearest understanding of his worldview comes from the fact that he is an unabashed Hitler fan boy. “If you take an objective look at what [Adolf Hitler] did, what he was all about, the policies that he implemented and championed…you will recognize that this man and his movement were the greatest thing that’s happened to Western civilization,” he said on The Brian Ruhe Show in December.