The dark history behind Donald Trump's nativist speech

Here's an experiment: Take Donald Trump's speech and everywhere he says "illegal immigrant," replace that with "Jew." How does it sound to you then?

It's the same thing, after all. Jews do commit crimes, sometimes - just like every other group of people. If he wanted, Trump could pick out and highlight horrific crimes from any group, including native-born white men like himself.

What Trump is saying is basically the same thing the Nazis said about the Jews in the 1930s. It's the same thing American bigots said about my Irish ancestors in the 1800's, not to mention about the Chinese, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans and, yes, the Jews. It's the same thing lynch mobs said about black people in the South.

As usual, Rachel Maddow does a great job here. We Americans are notoriously ignorant of history. In fact, all the right-wing cares about history is how they can distort it. But World War II wasn't that long ago, was it? Yes, it's history, but relatively recent history.

This isn't the first time we've seen such bigotry. We are a nation of immigrants, full of people who hate immigrants. Hell, Donald Trump's mother was an immigrant. It's almost funny.

Republican leaders brought Donald Trump on themselves with their notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists. For decades, they've been using bigotry for political advantage. And this has brought slime crawling out from under various dark, smelly rocks.

But I never thought I'd see one of our two main political parties nominate that slime as our next President of the United States.