In his response to last Saturday's
horrific events in Charlottesville, President Trump became the first Republican
politician to stand up to the bullying tactics the corporate press uses to
enforce its delusional narrative about political hatred and violence in America.
Most of the sympathetic commentary has rightly praised him for refusing
to minimize Antifa's role and, by extension, calling attention the wave of
left-wing violence over the past year that the corporate press has gone out of
its way to keep hidden. Many have also pointed out that Virginia
governor Terry
McAuliffe and local
officials appear to have intentionally pushed the peaceably assembled
"Unite the Right" marchers into the Antifa mob, and that McAuliffe
and local Democratic Party officials who let armed and masked men roam the
streets of Charlottesville deserve most of the blame and ought to be
prosecuted, punished, and ruined for their despicable designs.
The rest of the sympathetic commentary has
mostly focused on the president's brave defense of the legitimacy of monuments
to the Confederate dead and his pointing out that the logical conclusion of
demolishing and removing them will be the denigration of our nation's founders.
But there's been mostly silence concerning his remark that not all the
"Unite to Right" protesters were vile people who deserved what they
got, regardless of how illegal and repulsive the mechanism of delivery
was. Those supporting the president have largely been content with
granting the corporate media's assumption that the legally assembled marchers
were all white supremacist Nazi yahoos and
only insisting that their Antifa opponents were no better. This is not
without reason, since discussing whether any of the Unite the Right protesters
might have legitimate concerns beyond the destruction of historical monuments
takes us well outside the Overton window of current acceptable public
discourse.
But the president's remarks did move that
window a fair bit away from corporate media-propagated delusions and toward
reality, and perhaps the rest of us can now move it a bit farther.
Some of the marchers' dress unquestionably
showed a glorification of Nazism. My German Jewish paternal grandparents
were killed by the Nazis; if what I was told as a child is accurate, they were
forced to dig their own graves and then machine-gunned into them. My
father managed to escape by staying a little ahead of the German army as it
marched eastward. He wound up in Moscow, where he met my Russian Jewish
mother. Hitler had no more love for the Slavic part of my mother's
heritage than he did for the Semitic one. He called the
Slavic people "a mass of born slaves," and the Nazis
intentionally starved over 3 million Russian prisoners of war to
death.
Those Nazi-worshipers at the "Unite
the Right" rally shouldn't be allowed the delusion that the pathetic loser
they idolize, whose greatest contribution to history is a nuclear-armed Jewish
state, was in any way a champion of white folks. Nor should we accept
their delusions and call them "Nazis." They are sorry fools who
are as taken in by Hollywood's stock choice of villains as their Antifa
counterparts, and who respond by cosplaying as Nazis. Despite what
Hollywood teaches, the ideology they worship was particular to Germany and was
destroyed in WWII, and they are no more real Nazis than a psychopath who files
his teeth and wears a black cape is a real vampire. If he's dangerous, of
course the law must take him down. But we don't dignify and feed his
pathetic delusions by yielding to them.
Pathetic Nazi cosplayers were, by all the
available evidence, few and far between among those protesting the destruction
of monuments commemorating the Confederate Civil War dead. But, though
only a minority were worshipers of a failed 20th-century German ideology built
by one of history's greatest losers, I do believe that all were there to do
more than protest the destruction of historically significant monuments.
They were also protesting to promote the forbidden idea that there's
nothing wrong with white Christian Americans advocating for their group or
being proud of their heritage.
If I wanted to form another Jewish
advocacy group to add to the many already existing ones, no one would bat an
eye. And this is true even though Jews have substantially more political
and economic power, given our proportion of the population, than white
Christians could ever hope to attain. If a couple of Asians wanted to
form an Asian advocacy group, that would be perfectly acceptable as well, even
though, as a group, they too are socioeconomically better off than white
Christians. Jews and Asians are also generally successful enough to be
insulated from the negative effects of affirmative action and the importation
of cheap third-world labor.
White middle- and lower-class Christians
bear the brunt of globalism's destruction of the American working middle class.
As a result, deaths from alcohol and drug poisoning, suicide, and
alcoholic liver disease have risen
dramatically for them. Leading scholars on both the right and
the left proclaim that white Americans are in
crisis, and, though they don't typically add the "Christian"
qualifier, it's understood that the population is almost exclusively of
Christian descent. Many of them had ancestors here long before my parents
were admitted as refugees, and many had fathers and grandfathers who helped
defeat the real-life Nazis who killed my grandparents. Yet they alone
among all the ethnic groups in America are automatically branded as
"repellent racists" if they make any attempts to organize to protect
or enlarge their slice of the pie or even suggest that it might just possibly
be okay to express pride in their heritage. When moderate and reasonable
advocacy gets shouted down and falsely branded as hateful, all that's left is
the sort of outlandish but nonviolent ideas of Richard Spencer and the much
more outlandish and violent ones of Nazi cosplayers.
One way to normalize abhorrent ideas is to
present them as normal. But another more insidious way is to silence
reasonable concerns by conflating them with abhorrent ones so that the space
for normal people to express their reasonable concerns is eliminated, and the
only ideas and leaders left to follow are extremist. Tucker Carlson is
right that rampant identity politics cuts against the idea of our being a
single nation united by the bonds of citizenry. But I'm sure he's not
foolish enough to think the identity politics permitted as a matter of course
to everyone except white Christians has any hope of disappearing anytime soon.
And he's certainly right that extremist white identity politics is the
natural and expected reaction if all reasonable means white Christians have for
addressing legitimate concerns are automatically branded hateful and extreme.
It's both appalling and self-destructive
for sensible people to buy into the idea that all the marchers who suffered a
government-planned assault in Charlottesville are repellent racists and yahoos
for wanting to defend and show pride in their own in the same way every other
ethnic group in America can and, indeed, is encouraged to. If the crisis
in their community isn't enough to justify allowing them the same space to
organize and be proud that every other subdivision of American citizens has and
shows no willingness to abandon, what happened to them in Charlottesville,
which everyone knows wouldn't have conceivably been allowed to happen to any
other group, is more than enough justification for doing so. For people
worried about Richard Spencer's extreme and impossible ideas, and the far worse
hateful ideas of Nazi cosplayers, the surest way to increase their following is
to continue to stigmatize reasonable concerns and maliciously and hysterically
brand all attempts to address them, no matter how reasonable and
peaceful, as hateful.
Michael Thau has a Ph.D. in philosophy
from Princeton. He works as a freelance ghostwriter and content marketer
and blogs at A
Clearer Picture. He can be reached there or at thauwordsmith@gmail.com.
