White progressives must join with people of color to expose and confront Donald Trump’s coded racism

Excerpt from Jim Hightower's "Lowdown"

Being a muckraking political writer often makes me feel like a custodian in a horse barn, constantly shoveling manure. It’s a messy, stinky job–but, on the bright side, the stuff is plentiful, so the work is steady. Indeed, I’m now a certified Equine Excrement Engineer, having developed a narrow, but important, professional specialty: cleaning-off the horsestuff that careless politicos and sloppy media types keep dumping on the word “populist.”

As you might imagine, in this year of global political turmoil, I’ve been especially busy. Populism–a luminous term denoting both an uplifting doctrine of egalitarianism and a political-economic-cultural movement with deep roots in America’s progressive history–has been routinely sullied throughout 2016 by elites misusing it as a synonym for ignorance and bigotry:

When right-wing, anti-Muslim mobs in a few European nations literally went to their national borders to block desperate Syrian war refugees from getting safe passage into Europe, most mainline media labeled the boisterous reactionaries “populists”;
When flummoxed elites in Great Britain, frantic over Brexit, blindly blamed their people’s vote to exit the European Union on the “populist” bigotry of working-class Brits;
When, back in the USA, the unreal reality show The Donald spooked the corporate/political establishment, which denied that Trump had harnessed public fury toward them, but instead smugly attributed his rise solely to “populist” bumpkins who embraced his demeaning attacks on women, Mexicans, Muslims, union members, immigrants, people with disabilities, veterans, and others. Indeed, the power elites sneeringly branded Trump himself a “populist.”

Excuse me, but if that bilious billionaire blow-hard is a populist, then I’m a contender in his Miss Universe contest.
https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/confront-racism/