Rise of the ‘alt-right’: Clinton accuses Trump of white nationalist ties and stoking racial resentment

Hillary Clinton launched into a blistering new line of attack against Donald Trump on Thursday, accusing him of helping foment racial hatred and refashioning the Republican Party as a welcome home for white nationalists.

In unrestrained language during an address in Reno, Nevada, Clinton took aim at Trump’s affiliations with the so-called alt-right movement, a loosely organised network of anti-establishment activists on the right that helped fuel the GOP presidential nominee’s rise. The largely online movement includes legions of openly racist and anti-Semitic activists who operate in what Clinton described as the “far dark reaches of the internet.”

The alt-right has long cheered Trump, but his ties to the movement intensified with his latest campaign shake-up. Stephen Bannon, who led the right-wing website Breitbart News, is now running Trump’s campaign.

“There’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, a lot of it arising from racial resentment,” Clinton said. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it and giving it a national megaphone until now.”

Clinton called out Trump for retweeting white supremacists, for posting online an attack of her widely perceived as anti-Semitic — it included a Star of David imposed over piles of dollar bills — and for initially selecting a white-nationalist leader as a convention delegate from California.