"Anyone supporting Bernie Sanders is a white supremacist! Palin 2016!"
On Saturday, after one of the most absurd and quixotic "protests" in the history of protesting shut down a Bernie Sanders speaking engagement to "white supremacists" in Seattle, I trawled through several Democratic websites to gauge the immediate reaction. What I discovered was even more ridiculous than the protest itself: Loads and loads of conspiracy theory nonsense worthy of InfoWars.com or Tea Party Nation on a good day.
That arch-villianess, Hillary, must have nefariously infiltrated the Black Lives Matter movement, and clouded their minds into thinking that they must disrupt Sanders events -- all funded by Soros, of course. No evil plot is complete without the Puppetmaster pulling the strings. The alternative theory was that they were Republican plants, and we all know who
they're funded by.
Have we become so dumbed down as a nation that our first reaction to any unexpected event is to construct some outlandish and improbable conspiracy theory in order to show "the establishment" how wise we are to their game? Apparently so. While one expects this kind of rubbish from the conservative base, it is disconcerting to find the disease metastasizing among the supposedly more intelligent liberal community online.
Never attribute to a conspiracy what can be better explained by human foible. The "Black Lives Matter" protest against Bernie obviously wasn't some sinister Rovian political hit job. It was a few newly-empowered young women who don't know anything about Bernie Sanders lashing out over what they perceive to be the smugness of his Seattle supporters, who are, in the main, young, white, secular liberals. They were not targeting Bernie. They were targeting his followers. Could they have done that in a more appropriate way? Yes, I think so. It was incredibly rude to Bernie, and has produced a serious backlash within Black Lives Matter itself.
The more important takeaway is to recognize that there isn't simply a racial division between Black Lives Matter and white liberals. There is a religious one almost as deep. On her Facebook page, Marissa Jenae Johnson, the main protester on Saturday, wrote that the NetRoots disruption of O'Malley and Sanders last month had made her "jump and holler" because BLM "brought the word of the LORD to that place for real ... thanks be to Jesus, who marches us out of Egypt and unto resurrection! This is prophetic!" Given this and the other evangelical messages on her board, it comes as no surprise that Johnson was a Sarah Palin supporter not long ago. It puts her actions Saturday into perspective: for years, she heard that "the liberals" were trying to take God out of America, and all the rest of the right's demagoguery, and that fire still burns.
And therein lies the rub. Evangelicalism is something that white liberals almost exclusively associate with the right wing; therefore, they are taken aback by the black evangelicals who happen to comprise a large portion of the Democratic Party's base. What to make of them? The white middle-class Democratic voter today is far more likely to be an atheist, agnostic, "recovering Catholic," "spiritual but not religious," etc., secularist fervently committed to the separation of the church and state. And yet only a few black Democrats identify as such, and to many, the church means the whole world to them. They are inclined to look at the secularism of their party as an unfortunate trend, a symbol of white degeneracy -- not something to be celebrated. Or co-opted.
So it is a serious mistake to expect everyone in the Black Lives Matter movement to automatically be a member of the Democratic Party, a secularist, a liberal, or an anti-war activist. Or a Bernie Sanders supporter. We live in an incredibly diverse country, and no conspiracy theories are necessary or helpful when "unexpected" events like Saturday's protest happen.