In a Tuesday night special about Republican Donald Trump invigorating first-time voters, PBS NewsHour profiled a woman volunteering for the campaign who had prominently visible tattoos of widely recognized white power symbols.
In the segment, which was first flagged by Gawker, PBS profiles Grace Tilly, who is shown making calls at a Trump campaign phone bank in North Carolina.
“This is my first time voting,” Tilly tells the camera. “Being 33, that’s kind of crazy, but it says a lot.”
While Tilly makes a call, her tattoo of a symbol that Gawker identified as a Celtic Cross is easily visible on her right hand.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Celtic Cross is used by neo-Nazis, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and “virtually every other type of white supremacist.” The symbol is also used in the logo for Stormfront, an online hub for white supremacists.
Gawker also identified the tattoo on Tilly’s other hand as the number 88 which, according to the ADL, is white supremacist shorthand for “Heil Hitler.”
PBS made no mention of the symbols in the story, Gawker said.
A TPM request for comment from PBS NewsHour was not immediately returned Wednesday afternoon.
You can watch a clip of the segment over at Gawker.
I’m not surprised NewsHour missed them. The Celtic cross is ambiguous—it has a long history and a lot of associations—and 88 is deliberately designed to fly under the radar. (It’s less weird than their Rahowa cry.) Likely about half the folks here wouldn’t get either one.
Nothing says “proud of being white” like turning yourself mostly blue.
Typical for a Drumpfster. The tattoos were misspelled.
OK, a white supremacist or two endorses you. Not world ending. A candidate can’t control who endorses him, and let’s be honest, the GOP is the de facto party of white supremacy anyway. But when white supremacists are working for you, making robocalls for you, working in your campaign offices, it’s because they see a fellow traveler. They believe you’re the real deal. And it’s time for sane white folks to sit down and ask themselves why, why this is OK. Why are you willing to side with the worst elements of our society and, most importantly, if everything he’s promising comes to fruition, will it be worth setting our country back a century? Will it be worth going back to the days of Jim Crow?
“But really, between all the cross burning, meth cooking, and parole officer meetings, who has time?”