This week, CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers stated that white nationalist terrorism is on the rise and that the Trump administration is ignoring it, although federal prosecutors are not.
Writing on the CNN website Tuesday, legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers points out that white supremacist terrorism appears to be on the rise. “Headlines are full of recent terrorist attacks carried out by people with white supremacist views; they include the Tree of Life synagogue killer, the Coast Guard lieutenant charged with plotting a major attack on politicians and news anchors perceived to be left-leaning (he has pleaded not guilty), the New Zealand mosque killer, and the mail bomber Cesar Sayoc,” Rodgers writes.
She points out that the Trump administration seems to have ignored the findings of federal law enforcement that white supremacist terrorism poses as persistent threat. FBI Director Christopher Wray also found that white supremacy is a “persistent, pervasive threat.”
Yet, the Department of Homeland Security has disbanded an intelligence and analysis unit devoted to homegrown extremists.
Yes, the Department of Homeland Security disbanded its Domestic Terrorism working group, while cases of violent white supremacy continue to grow.
“It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,” one former intelligence official told The Daily Beast.
The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.
Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.
“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.
In response to this report, DHS has argued that this reorganization has not changed its commitment to protecting the American people, and that this is not an indication that the department has diminished the “mission … to ensure that state and local partners can expeditiously access the capabilities, resources, and expertise necessary to share information and intelligence. ”
Somehow, I find that less than convincing.
I find these denials particularly unconvincing as Daily Kos’ own Laura Clawson reports that Pew research indicates race relations are getting worse.
The survey, by the Pew Research Center, offers something of a field guide to white delusions about race, with a special focus on the chasm between white Republicans and white Democrats. Just 15 percent of white Republicans say the U.S. hasn’t done enough to give black people equal rights to white people, and more than twice that number of white Republicans actually think the country has done too much for racial equality. Republicans also think that people seeing racial discrimination where it doesn’t really exist is a bigger problem than people failing to see discrimination where it does exist.
By contrast, 64 percent of white Democrats recognize that the U.S. hasn’t done enough to promote equal rights, and white Democrats are far more likely to point to unacknowledged racial discrimination as a problem than they are to whine that racial discrimination complaints are false.
About two-thirds of black people say that being black makes it harder for a person to get ahead; just 55 percent of white people agree with that, but it’s the breakdown in why they agree that’s particularly interesting. White Democrats echo black people by pointing to racial discrimination and less access to good schools and high-paying jobs. White Republicans blame black people, by naming family instability, lack of good role models, and lack of motivation to work hard. Really.
There’s also the fact that Huffpost released a letter by DHS senior policy adviser Katherine Gorka which called for pulling a $400,000 grant to anti-hate group Life After Hate, founded by former members of extremist groups intended to guide people out of the white nationalist movement, by arguing that “anti-fascists are “the actual threats” to national security. Other emails indicate that she had also pushed to cancel their grant because the founder once tweeted “Fuck you, asshole” to Trump.
Gorka, a senior policy adviser at the DHS, made the suggestion in response to a request from then–Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, who was apparently unhappy about critical media coverage of the agency’s revamped Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. Kelly wanted staffers to come up with examples of organizations “that counter-hate groups,” an aide wrote in an email, which HuffPost obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Gorka couldn’t think of any specific groups, she wrote in response. But “it would also be important to get the data on the actual threats right now,” she added, “because my understanding is that the far-left groups (Antifa, or anti-fascist) are currently on the rise.”
Her claim, which is not backed by any data, is the most obvious example of a trend that pervades a tranche of DHS emails obtained by HuffPost: Trump administration officials came into office with very specific — and mistaken — ideas about what violent extremism in the U.S. looked like, then went searching for evidence to back up those ideas.
The emails, which date from February to August 2017, show Gorka and other Trump administration officials working diligently to find reasons to strip government funding from two organizations selected as CVE grant recipients under the Obama administration: the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which was planning to use its $393,800 grant to expand mental health and counseling services in Muslim communities, and Life After Hate, which was going to use its $400,000 to help white supremacists leave the movement
So rather than working against white supremacist groups or working with anti-hate groups, Gorka apparently pushed to do the opposite.
Gorka is also the wife of former White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, who thinks Democrats are trying to “take away your hamburgers” and has a habit of proudly wearing his father’s Vitezi Rend pin, which was awarded to Nazi collaborators in his native Hungary. Both had previously written books on jihad and ran an anti-Islamic think tank.
So it seems that Trump really isn’t repulsed that much by the Gorkas’ behavior.
All of this is made even worse by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly endorsed racist tropes and recently pandered to the alt-right with his new campaign ad, which argued that he’s been “exonerated” by Robert Mueller and attacked the FBI and Democrats for “Treason.” The ad was pulled down because of copyright violations for using music from the Batman film The Dark Knight without authorization. But it turns out this reference wasn’t random: it’s part of an alt-right white power meme, just like Pepe the Frog.
However, “The Dark Knight Rises” reference is different because of how the film has been appropriated by the alt-right. As with Pepe the Frog, the creators do not share the political views of those on the alt-right, but their creative property has nonetheless been hijacked by outspoken racists. The Christopher Nolan-directed film — and, more specifically, its fascistic revolutionary villain, Bane — has been referenced in racist hate speech directed against Black Lives Matter protesters by the popular alt-right site Virginia Dare and throughout the far right corners of the Internet.
This writer can also attest to the popularity of the Bane character among America’s alt-right. When Andrew Anglin, founder of The Daily Stormer, wrote an anti-Semitic hit piece against this writer for an editorial that was picked up by Salon in December of 2015, he included a supposed transcript entitled “Leaked Tape from Jew Conference” which altered the dialogue from one scene in “The Dark Knight Rises” and juxtaposed Bane with Trump. After this writer pointed out Bane was the villain of the movie and one of its screenwriters, David S. Goyer, is Jewish, Anglin responded by writing:
As far as Bane – yes, Jew, I understand he’s ostensibly the antagonist, and I understand Goyer is Jew. Think that one through for a second. It should really be self-explanatory why a fascist would relish in Jewish fears of fascism – which is what Bane represents – especially when the Jewish fears are presented so beautifully by a talented goy like Christopher Nolan.
So we have the so-called “leader of the free world” using the same racist pop culture memes and references as the swamp dwellers at the Daily Stormer to support his campaign. And reports also indicate that white nationalists are increasingly recruiting gamers into their ranks.
In an interview with Zack Beauchamp at Vox, Megan Condis, a professor of communication at Texas Tech, explained that often gamers are young white men who feel they don’t fit in anywhere else making them easy to influence when offered the opportunity to be invited to join a group.
According to Condis, “If you look at what a gamer is, if they’re a character in a movie or on a television show like The Big Bang Theory, it’s the stereotypical image of the straight white male. A lot of people who do resemble that stereotype and who do feel as though they aren’t accepted in other areas of culture — maybe they aren’t particularly popular at school or maybe they don’t feel like they kind of resonate with other things that are considered popular in culture — I think a lot of them have grabbed on to that stereotype.”
“So if now if this place isn’t going to accept me, then where am I going to go” she continued. “I think that’s where white supremacists or alt-right folks come in and they say, ‘Well, you have to go deeper. You have to go further into being insular and like ‘this space, we definitely won’t be letting in anyone different.’”
With Beauchamp pointing out, “You’ve noted that far-right political factions and white nationalists are actively taking advantage of these dynamics to actively radicalize young men and recruit them to their cause,” Condis mentioned the fact that former Donald Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon recognized the dynamic during what was known as “
Gamergate.”
I can say that I've seen some of this myself. During the last several years, I was a player on the game
Battlestar Galactica Online and found a lot of alt-right, proto-supremacist attitudes among some of my fellow players, particularly those who played the game as Cylons rather than humans. As a player vs. player game (PVP) there was a tendency to divide into factions, but this went much further than just a left-right or even Human-Cylon divide. It became quite intense, as I noted when I wrote up the
history of a fighter wing I joined within the game and eventually led as admiral, the Red Rippers. (Request for access required)
In the beginning, there was gALAGA and Imutep, who originally started the wing together naming it after a real life Navy Fighter Wing VFA-11 Red Rippers who currently fly F/A-18 Super Hornets from the deck of the USS Theordore Roosevelt. Within the game they grew to become a powerful wing on the Caprica Server who featured nearly a dozen Carrier pilots, with a large contingent of Line, Escort and Strike support who were essentially able to roll every red outpost off the map each and everyday with only minimal support from other players or wings.
[...]
When I joined the wing, my Kill Death Ratio (KDR) was just 0.17 since I'd been flying around virtually alone and had only 200 PVP kills and about 1500 deaths by packs of nugget ganking Cylons -- usually in Wegelin -- who would swoop in out of nowhere, pound every low-level player into dust then speed away with a "Mwah ha ha" into the dark. It seemed like they were actively trying to discourage new players and crush their spirits so they would quickly quit and give up. (Which is apparently, exactly what happened to hundreds upon hundreds of them!)
In both the 1978 and 2004 television shows that inspired the game, Cylons were a group of murderous genocidal terrorists who attempted to destroy the entire human race using nuclear weapons and war crimes. The designers of the game felt that your basic normal human being wouldn't want to play the “bad guy” without being given certain perks to incite them to do so and maintain a certain level of “balance” between the Human and Cylon factions. I always felt this wasn’t really necessary, as there would also be people who would prefer to play Freddie Kruger rather than Nancy Thompson, the titular hero of
Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street who was portrayed by Heather Langenkamp. If you had a chance to cosplay as hero rather than pretend to be the monster that makes them jump in the night, quite a few people would choose the relative inhibition and freedom of being a monster. They really didn't need to give perks to Cylons, because they got used to them and grew both arrogant and cocky because of it.
Many of them were happy to play exactly the part of “monster,” and within that they had an ideology of being relentlessly aggressive, rude, “non-PC,” and more than a bit bigoted, sexist, and racist. They, of course, would constantly deny and object to this characterization—but that was largely exactly what it was. They were weak little outsiders who used the ability to show power that internal game perks provided them for playing on the Cylon side to become a pack of bigoted thugs and bullies.
The big "secret" to their so-called Cylon greatness was basically cowardice, they flew together like a pack never letting any single player stray too far away so that all of their guns could be brought onto the same target at the same time using voice coms to coordinate everything. It's not like it was Rocket Surgery, it was a pretty simple plan and also effective, but once you got them going they just wouldn't shut up about it like they'd invented the wheel, water, the sun, the moon and the cure for the common cold. Geez.
Eventually, I raised my KDR ratio up to 1.102, meaning that I won slightly more fights than I lost during my entire time on the game. However that was after starting of with a rating that was about one-seventh of that, so my actual daily and weekly average was about 1.78, or nearly 2 to 1, near the end of things.
In this video I participated in a fairly large battle using the Galactica 2004-styled Viper MarkVII fighter, which took place not long before the game finally shut down a few months ago. Just to make my point, one of the players I battle against in this fight has the callsign “ImaNiggyDad” (his ship blows up at 5:07), so I’m not exaggerating their attitude even slightly. Not long after that, in a common Cylon move as I left the battle at 5:05 (I was actually trying to get the video to stop recording), two Cylons literally chased me down for several minutes (until 10:31) just to gang up and double-team my lone fighter when I didn't have anyone else around to help. One launched missiles at me while the other one used a special electronic countermeasure similar to what was used in the 2004 BSG mini-series to shut down my engines so I couldn’t escape or maneuver. This type of ambush was their idea of “fun.” Sadly, it was typical.
(I advise watching this full screen and I apologize for the poor audio.)
This is exactly what they were like: vicious and relentless, even with someone who had departed the main battle and had flown halfway across the system. These days I play Star Trek Online fairly regularly, which is more cooperative and far less of a PVP game.
Just as I had seen this type of dishonorable behavior in video games, it’s also happened with fans of the sci-fi and action genres. Again, as I wrote a few weeks ago about the Brie Larson/Captain Marvel backlash, people who should have been fairly fully acclimated to the concepts of inclusion and diversity through programs they claim to be fans of such as Star Wars and Star Trek have instead devolved into self-admitted “Harpies.” One is shown in thIs video, where she argues that a writer from the The Mary Sue complaining about online trolling by right-wing men’s rights activist (MRA) trolls is herself guilty of being a “racist, sexist, and heterophobic” for daring to criticize bigots.
Ladies and Gents: I give you MechaRandom42. (Warning: not at all safe for work.)
I understand as I’ve said before at length that this isn’t about women or people of color: It’s about protecting white male characters from getting their feelings hurt, although that I trust it’s basically a distinction without a real difference when you look at their ultimate arguments and actions, such as whining about a writer “name calling” people who have viciously attacked any woman who has spoken out in support of inclusion and then immediately saying she’s a “cunt” who should “smoke a fat one.” These people, as shown, don’t admit to their bigotry and racism—they project it onto others.
Here, though, YouTuber Steve Shives expertly points out that so-called “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) also included people such as the great bird of the Universe, Gene Roddenberry, who was specifically the one who invented Star Trek with exactly that purpose in mind. Trek has always been inclusive and progressive but all of a sudden these days, that very fact is considered a threat.
Just to follow up this point, here are clips from a special release of the original pilot for Star Trek, titled “The Cage,” where Gene Roddenberry himself says exactly what Steve says: that the entire point of Star Trek was showing that before we can go out and try to interact with other people from other worlds, we need to get our own racial issues straightened out.
Now it may seem somewhat off the point and slightly trivial to point out what’s happened with superhero and sci-fi fandom in the context of race relations, but the fact is there was a point when Nichelle Nichols wanted to leave Star Trek in order to do a play, and it took Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to talk her out of it because of the importance of what she represented to him and other African-American fans.
Nichelle remaining on Star Trek became part of the inspiration for one of our first black female astronauts, Dr. Mae Jemison.
Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space with the U.S. space program, told a crowd of nearly 100 Friday evening that Star Trek inspired her.
"As a little girl growing up on the south side of Chicago in the ‘60s I always knew I was going to be in space," she said from the podium in Richard White lecture Hall. Star Trek's Lt. Uhura, an African-American character from science fiction, encouraged her to literally reach for the stars.
"We may not all want to go but we all want to know what its like," she said of outer space. "It's a part of our deepest longing as humans. Fundamentally we want to know who we are and where we come from."
So even after 22 Marvel MCU movies, we still didn’t get a female lead until Captain Marvel, and apparently we don’t deserve one. We shouldn’t have gotten Commander Michael Burnham on Star Trek: Discovery or we shouldn’t have Rey on Star Wars because without them there would be no difference, and there wouldn’t be thousands of young girls who might ever consider what they themselves might be capable of. People like Mae Jemison. Is it just too much to ask to go beyond Ripley from Aliens or Sarah Connor from Terminator 30 years ago? All we need is Alita the Battle Cyborg now? The battle of the sexes is over, Alita won. We can all go home, eh?
If we can’t even imagine a measure of equality in our fantasy life, how exactly are we going to implement it in our real lives? Before you can actualize a positive vision, you have to be able to dream and imagine it credibly. This is how true progress works: someone dares to have the audacity to dream it up, then someone else goes out with equal and greater audacity and actually does it. If you can’t even imagine it, you’ll never implement it.
Before there was a real President Barack Obama, there was a President David Palmer on 24 portrayed by Dennis Haysbert and a President Beck in Deep Impact portrayed by Morgan Freeman. This progress was not insignificant even though it was slow, particularly when you compare this to one of Freeman’s first prominent roles as the vicious violent pimp named Fast Black who terrorized a reporter played by Christopher Reeve in 1987’s Street Smart. From Pimp to president in one career—that’s something.
People like MechaRandom42 are arguing that it’s wrong to complain about sexist MRA trolls attacking Captain Marvel because Brie Larson made a public statement in support of inclusion during an interview with Marie Claire.
Which was this:
‘About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male. So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive. After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.’
The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative Larson mentions documents that of more than 1,200 movies made in the last 12 years, only 28 percent of them have had female lead or co-lead characters, only 15 percent have had lead characters who were people of color, and only 4 percent have featured women of color as a lead. This means that at least 72 percent of lead characters in the last 12 years of movies are not just men: they’re white men.
They claim that “just saying such a thing is sexist” (even though it’s mathematically true), that it’s wrong to point out how white-male normative our films, and hence our perception of our culture, are. It shouldn’t even be talked about and that is where some of these ideas get normalized. That is where they become entrenched and Mecha gets greeted with a “Right On, Dude” and a “You go get ‘em,” just as we might see on InfoWars or in the center of the Daily Stormer.
It’s been 50 years since Uhura on Star Trek. We didn’t even know her first name until the JJ Abram’ reboot movie in 2009. We didn’t know Sulu’s first name — Hikiru — either until Star Trek VI which came out in 1991, plus there’s the fact that “Sulu” isn’t really a Japanese name because “L” isn’t part of their alphabet. Just last year we finally had a woman of color as a lead character on Star Trek, and the MRAs have been losing their minds over it ever since. They say that their criticism has nothing to do with her race and gender, while half of what they say about her is that she’s a “Mary Sue” and only on the show because of SJW politics that “don’t belong in Star Trek.” They say she isn’t “likeable.” Yeah, well, neither was Rosa Parks, and in his time they called MLK a “communist” and a “socialist” and repeatedly put him in jail, but that didn’t stop either one of them. Frankly, this rate of progress has been pathetically slow, but it is still progress. We have to realize that the more we gain, the more they’ll fight back, cry, and whine in outrageous indignation.
This battle is taking place right under our noses, right where very few of us expect it to happen: in the middle of our video games, on our phones, and other entertainment. Hidden in plain sight, right in front of us. Online.
Mecha and her ilk are the kind of people who pretty much don’t much care that Trump reportedly wants a former hate group leader in charge of Citizenship and Immigration Services:
On Wednesday, Politico reported that President Donald Trump wants to name Julie Kirchner to lead the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency in charge of processing immigration and naturalization.
Kirchner, who currently serves as ombudsman to the agency, is the former leader of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Southern Poverty Law Center
lists FAIR as a hate group “because it promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones.”
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a white supremacist and eugenicist who has said U.S. immigration policy must preserve “an ethnic white majority.” The group has also received support from the Pioneer Fund, a group that advocates “race betterment” by protecting the genes of people “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”
“Our history always haunts,” Glaude said. “There are these incidents, events that happen in our lives that trigger history, a history that we haven’t gotten beyond. So, to see churches burn, it strikes at the heart of the ugliness of who we are — not who we were, but who we are.”
Rothman put on his aggrieved face and asked to respond.
“These are heinous crimes, and we should treat them like heinous crimes,” he said, and then proceeded to try to minimize them. “But in 2016, you had two — an arson attack and a vandalism attack on black churches, the intent was to make people think the bad old days were well and truly back,” he continued as Glaude began shaking his head. “And that’s what was broadcast, the pervasive effort by these people was to make us think that this was the result of Donald Trump’s election.”
“This is not responsible for you to take statistically insignificant moments and read them write large over the course of American history,” Glaude said. “Yet in your book and in this moment, you want to generalize it to call into question a basic point that I was making — that when you see something like this, it triggers history.”
“Statistically insignificant.” It’s only three black churches in a few weeks in the same parish—it’s not like a trend or anything. Not after the Christchurch mass murder in New Zealand, or the attack on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or the Quebec mosque Attack, or the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, or the Muslim attack in East London, or the five mosque attacks in Birmingham. Right—no trend there.
It’s not like we recently found white power graffiti from the fascist Romanian Iron Guard near the site of the burned Highland Research and Education Social Justice Center in Tennessee, which hosted MLK and Rosa Parks during the civil rights era.
A white power symbol associated with Romania’s historical fascist movement — and which has since been used by white nationalists — was found spray-painted near the scene of a fire that engulfed part of the Highlander Education and Research Center on Friday.
The symbol, seen in a picture published by the Knoxville News Sentinel Wednesday, appears to be what was historically a symbol used by the Iron Guard. The guard was the military wing of — and later shorthand for — the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a Romanian fascist movement that was a considerable political force in the 1930s.
People like MechaRandom can’t be bothered with getting upset about anything like that. They’re much too busy losing their minds over a Gillette commercial.
In a new ad campaign, the razor company Gillette is asking men to commit to kindness, solidarity, and common decency. Predictably, men’s-rights activists and affiliated groups are rejecting this out of hand.
On Monday, the brand, which is owned by Procter & Gamble, released a new short film called “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” Directed by Kim Gehrig, the ad takes stock of harmful behaviors that have been coded as “masculine.” It references bullying, sexual harassment, mansplaining, and the sexual-misconduct allegations that started in 2017 with Harvey Weinstein. It also challenges the notion that “boys will be boys,” and concedes that its past ads often told a one-note story about masculinity.
Among the replies is a fair amount of backlash: “Well that’s pretty insulting … does Gillette honestly think that real men have to be told what to teach their sons. May be time to look for a new razor,” Bernard Kerik, the former New York City Police Chief who served three years in prison on fraud charges, wrote. A Voice for Men, the men’s-rights group that was listed as a hate group in 2018 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is urging followers to boycott the brand. Piers Morgan also chimed in, in a very Piers Morgan way:
Let bullies, rapists, and misogynist be bullying, rapey, and misogynist? Let assholes be assholes? Exactly how do these guys get the right to complain about being asked to not be shitheads? Just asking for that is an offensive bridge too far, now?
Obviously, they like being shitheads and they feel entitled to be shitheads, just like the Cylon players I dealt with in BSGO. Shockingly, the rest of us don’t feel that way.
Because it’s not like we had a white nationalism hearing go completely off the rails this week as the GOP used a black woman and a Jewish man to gaslight Congress on the threat of white nationalism.
When Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee decided to hold a hearing on white nationalism, Republicans immediately set out to derail it. Following their longstanding pattern of inviting disreputable witnesses to testify before Congress, Republicans invited black conservative pundit Candace Owens and Mort Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, to downplay the threat of white nationalism. Democrats on the committee, for their part, asked representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, Equal Justice Society, and the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — as well as officials from Facebook and Google — to testify at Tuesday’s hearing.
What could have been a fruitful opportunity to address rampant white nationalism online and its rising body count in the real world, to hold tech giants accountable, and to ferret out best practices on deradicalization in a meaningful way that perhaps saves lives was “hijacked,” in the words of Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I. Instead of addressing the
threat of white nationalism in the United States and around the world, Republicans sought to claim that Democrats only pretend to care about anti-Semitism and racism as a cudgel against conservatives. From their witness list to their questions to their sustained attack on a colleague and Democrats, Republicans deliberately tried to evade the issue of growing white supremacist violence and trivialized the hearing. And based on the pervasive coverage, it appears that they were successful.
As the committee hearing convened, with Rep Jerry Nadler (D-NY) chairing public testimony by experts on extremism, the comments quickly filled up with YouTube viewers launching attacks, including one calling the assembled Republicans and Democrats a “DIVERSE PANEL OF JEWS.”
Rep. Louis Gohmert responded by suggesting that comments such as “anti-hate means anti-white” and “the Jews want to destroy white nations” could be false flags and some kind of “hate hoax” intended to inflate the perception of racism. So we have “fake” racists on YouTube now? Aren’t the real ones obvious enough?
Rep. Sylvia Gomez broke down in tears during the hearing on white nationalism as she discussed hate crime victim David Richardson.
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on white nationalism in the U.S., Garcia recalled the story of deceased hate crime victim David Richardson.
As she spoke about the details of the attack on Richardson, she began to sob.
“[Richardson] was targeted for being Mexican-American,” Garcia explained. “His attackers, one an admitted racist skinhead, attempted to carve a Swastika on his chest. Richardson was brutally beat to a pulp, burned with cigarettes and left for dead.”
However GOP guest Candace Owens wasn’t moved, and launched an off-the-rails rant against Antifa in the hearing on white supremacy, claiming that as a conservative she had been the victim of “left-wing” violence and “changed statistics.”
“What they won’t tell you about the statistics and the rise of white nationalism is that they’ve simply changed the data set points by widening the definition of hate crimes and upping the number of reporting agencies that are able to report on them!” she said. “They are manipulating statistics!”
Owens went on to say that the goal of purportedly faking hate crime statistics is to scare people of color into voting for Democrats in 2020 because “they feel that Donald Trump should not have beat Hillary.”
“If they were actually concerned about white nationalism they would be holding hearings on Antifa, a far-left violent white gang who determined, one day in Philadelphia, that I, a black woman, was not fit to sit in a restaurant!” she said.
Somehow, I don’t think they were protesting you because you are a black woman—but predictably twisting the facts and reality into a salty pretzel is the stock and trade of the GOP and MRAs.
Fortunately, Rep. Ted Lieu humiliated Owens’ historically illiterate Hitler comments at the hearing.
“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine,” Owens said. “The problem is he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.”
After playing the clip, Lieu then asked Anti-Defamation League executive Eileen Hershenov if statements like Owens’ “feed into white nationalist ideology.”
“It does, Mr. Lieu,” she replied, although she added that Owens “distanced herself from those comments later.”
Another example is when Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted that Trump adviser Stephen Miller is a white nationalist and then GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin attacked her for “name calling” of Jewish people, even though she was pretty much dead-on right about Miller.
Meanwhile, former Georgia House Speaker Stacy Abrams also said that Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who doesn't care about protecting Americans. But, somehow Rep. Zeldin doesn’t talk any anti-Semitic shit to her. (Maybe it’s because she’s not Muslim?)
And then CNN guest Angela Rye explained “This is why Miller is compared to Hitler,” while slamming Trump-lover Steve Cortes over white nationalism.
“Stephen Miller has been a white nationalist and he’s been one since before high school when he told a childhood friend that they could no longer be friends because of his Latino heritage,” she said.
“Why does he espouse principles found in the mouths of people that believe ugly things about diversity?” Cuomo asked.
Cortes struggled to answer the question and to defend Miller.
“It’s very important to define here that defending America’s borders is never about race. America is not a white country. We’re an incredibly diverse country and country that loves immigrants,” Cortes said.
Rye explained to him what white nationalism really means.
“Among the many [definitions ] that you offered was an idea of superiority and I think that’s exactly the problem. That’s exactly why Donald Trump is compared to Hitler. It’s exactly why Stephen Miller has been called a white supremacist and a racist. Someone that is xenophobic. Someone that’s hateful about Muslims,” she said.
Adding, “Someone that is a very hateful individual and that is rooted in his policy positions and debate in hate and fear mongering because people are worried about losing their position in the world. That is why to ‘Make America Great Again’ is so frustrating to so many of us. That’s why white nationalism and white supremacy were problematic when Donald Trump said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville.”
And I think that gets exactly to the heart of the matter.: All bigotry and bias is not the same. There is also the aspect of the level of power and vulnerability of the target in that particular social situation. True racism is often considered bigotry plus power. There may be many situations where someone doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t like you, and may even publicly call you out. The question is, are they doing so from a position of advantage, or from a relative position of weakness? Are they punching up, or punching down?
At this point in time, women and minorities are hardly in any real position to be punching down on anyone else. At best they may be shadow boxing. But as you can see, the reaction from the Stormers and the MRAs is as if they’ve been scalped, lynched, burned at the stake and are being skinned alive.
Because of a Gillette commercial.
Because Brie Larson thinks that having 80 percent of movie reviewers and interviewers all be white men when they’re only about 36 percent of the nation just might be a wee bit out of balance. Because it’s just too much for them to say that most terrorist attacks around the world now happen to be committed by white nationalists. Because merely pointing out that major members of the Trump administration who are supposed to be battling against terrorists are themselves supporters of white nationalism.
Here’s a video that perfectly describes how political youtube works at sucking people into it’s alt-right/MRA anti-SJW vortex and how that leads first from a few alternative worldview ideas to propaganda about the “Great Replacement” of white people by immigrants and people of color — inclusion overload — and how that links to “free abortion” and the rationalization of running over #BlackLivesMatter protesters with cars. This is all happening both in the U.S. and in Europe in conjunction with Brexit.
Simply talking about race—just the very existence of the idea—is too much for some of these people, and the fact is they have the luxury of not having to talk about it. They have the luxury of not really having to worry about it in any real, serious way.
The fact is they’re terrified that they might lose their primary position in society, where they automatically get 70 to 80 percent of the available slots before anyone else is ever considered. They still, to this day, get more than 70 percent of the speaking parts in TV and movies. They get 70 to 80 percent of the slots in most universities, and 70 to 80 percent of the well-paying jobs.
They don’t mind a few other people slipping in under the transom, like having one movie with a tough, kick-ass character like Ripley or Sarah Connor once in a few decades.
But don't make them worry that that might become a regular thing. Don’t make them think about acting decently, and don’t make them worry that they might have to earn their slot against a broad array of competition for positions they assume they already have a right to and should always keep.
Don't make them scared or angry. We won't like them when they’re angry.
They don't realize that technically, we don’t really like most of the MRAs and white nationalists anyway. We never will, and we can’t afford to give a shit about how angry they get.
Bigotry is essentially an act of cowardice. It’s making unfair and unjustified assumptions about someone else because you don't have the guts to discover whether your presumptions are actually correct. It can only be battled by courage: by having the guts to find out the truth, case by case, person by person, without any preconceptions or presumptions to finding out who someone really is. Sometimes you just might be pleasantly surprised, and sometimes you won’t.
They scream and whine over minor and irrelevant offenses like movie casting choices and Gillette commercials because they don’t have that kind of courage, but we have to.
We don’t have a real choice, because courage is the only path to anything better. Take the chance. Be audacious. Break the mold. Write a new story with a new hero.
Be that hero.