There’s weird, and then there is at least the appearance of dangerously weird, to wit:

When JerriAnne Boggis’s name ended up on a list on the website of a white supremacist group, it was the follow-up to that listing that should have all of us concerned and appalled.

Boggis, of Milford, got a phone message from a woman who left a long rant about how white people “have more guns and are coming for you.”

Needless to say, the cowardly woman didn’t leave her name, just her racist message.

But there’s more: In that phone call, the woman accused Boggis of trying to kill her child, apparently by just being black.

Boggis said the woman on the phone was expressing some “deep, deep fear and anger.”

Sad and pathetic as this telephone call was, it was, unfortunately, not surprising. Not anymore. Certainly people like the anonymous woman have always been with us, have always had these thoughts and probably often expressed them, but in more private ways.

Now? Now, unfortunately, people like this woman seem to feel free to make calls to people like Boggis and leave messages like the one she got. Obviously, though, the woman wasn’t quite sure it was entirely acceptable to leave racist rants, thus her anonymity, but the very fact that she did so — and, we can only hope, from her home phone so the police can trace her — should give all of us pause to wonder why she felt free to do it.

Except we know why.

Donald Trump, with his belicosity, his rants, his disparaging of immigrants, his at least implicit racism, he gave her permission. Her and more like her, like the people who put together the white supremicist website that targetted Boggis and 120 other people, many of whom attended a confernce to examine whether more diversity might ease New Hampshire’s labor shortage.

Horrors, the white supremicists seem to think. Horrors. How dare anyone suggest more diversity to solve … anything. No, white supremicists want less diversity. They want white, white and more white because, after all, white people are … are what? Better? Smarter? What?

The argument white supremacists try to advance is that they aren’t racists, they simply want to protect the rights of white people. That’s why the website is called New Hampshire Nationalist News, as if “Nationalist” weren’t a code word for “more white, less anything else.”

Protect the rights of white people. Ponder that. Have white people lost the right to anything? To vote, for instance? Some states try to make it harder for minorities to vote but can you think of any state, city or town that is making it more difficult for white folks to go to the polls?

Here’s what white nationalists really fear: Reality. The reality that tells them, and us, that the United States is on its way to becoming a minority-majority country, where minorities outnumber white people. It’s not a plot, it wasn’t planned by Mexico. It’s just a fact and not only because more minorities are entering the country. It’s also because people now feel free to intermarry, something that was forbidden to them for decades. It’s just the way things are happening today.

And some white people just don’t like it. But they prefer to call themselves “nationalists,” as if that fools anyone.

There are many people out there like the poor woman who called Boggis. They hide behind anonymity and labels like “nationalist,” but they feel so much more free to express their hatred than they did just a few years ago.