By Gordon Hull
Although they murdered one person, injured 19 others, and celebrated two governments, one of which systematically exterminated over 6 million people in the name of white supremacy, and another that systematically murdered and enslaved millions more, also in the name of white supremacy, members of the far right somehow managed to proudly act like newly liberated victims of something or another (“cultural Marxism?”). It’s not like Charlottesville should have been a surprise; the FBI and DHS warned about the threat from white supremacists months ago. White supremacists had been nursing fantasies of running over liberals with cars for quite some time, and racist hate crimes – including, as in Portland, the murder of those who try to stop racist hate crimes – have (unsurprisingly) been on the rise since Trump came to power. Moreover, what happened last weekend was not about free speech and marches. It was much more about political violence and intimidation: they showed up in Charlottesville looking for a fight, toting semi-automatic weapons and militia groups so that they might not just exercise their First Amendment rights, but deprive others of their First Amendment rights.
Their President has managed to support their agenda even as he supposedly disavowed it yesterday, fueling the idiotic idea that the most oppressed people in the U.S. are white. Away from his handlers, apparently, Trump today repeated the “many sides” rhetoric (first, he uttered one of the greatest lies of his entire presidency: “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts”), claiming that there was “blame on both sides” for the violence, including on the “alt-left.” Message received: David Duke promptly tweeted “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.”
The idea that there is a moral equivalence between Black Lives Matter and right wing terrorism is beyond staggering, no matter how many times Fox News repeats it. In the meantime, Trump again demonstrated his utter ignorance of the facts, saying that it should be “up to a local town, community” whether to remove Confederate monuments, failing to know that the neo-Nazis came from all over the country to intimidate Charlottesville into not removing a monument.
Disturbingly, Trump’s dog-whistle response to Charlottesville makes a hero of any conservative who can manage to condemn Nazism, no matter how much structural racism they otherwise sign on for, as Mark Graber pointed out:
“President Trump, the Klan, the alt-right, and the Republican Party won a stunning rhetorical victory yesterday when the American media and a great many Americans defined racism downwards to 1930 standards. Republicans who tolerate or support police brutality in African-American communities, horribly inadequate representation for criminal defendants of color (including lawyers who fall asleep at trial), substantial underrepresentation of African-Americans on grand and petit juries, and criminal laws and criminal law enforcement that has resulted in the imprisonment of a stunning high percentage of African-American men became racial moderates because they denounced the Klan and overt expressions of white supremacy.”
So where are these new racial moderates? Unfortunately, even the ability to denounce neo-Nazis and the KKK seems beyond a lot of Republicans. There were some initial, commendable and very strongly worded condemnations from Orrin Hatch, Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, Paul Ryan, and others. Trump’s performance today has drawn a new round of sharp criticism. But a whole lot of Republicans haven’t said anything.
It is time to demand that all elected representatives publicly denounce the violence of the “alt-right” and denounce Trump’s support of it. But that is not enough. As Hardt and Negri said in a somewhat different context, “destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds” (Empire, 404). Here that means moving the Overton Window back into the 21st Century. It is accordingly time to use appropriate terminology. “Terrorism” is a minimum. But maybe even better, how about “Radical White Terrorism?”
First, it is time to drop sanitizing euphemisms like “alt-right,” or “white nationalism.” I already emailed both my senators and my House rep, politely asking them to exert the moral leadership opportunity they have as elected officials, and denounce Radical White Terrorism. Not that I think they will (although I’m curious to see what they’ll say in the form letter response that should arrive in a week or two), but one of the greatest risks of the Trump candidacy and administration is its ability to destroy language, and in the process make the merely awful sound reasonable. That, I take it, was a substantial part of Graber’s point.
Second, the term deliberately echoes the Trumpian demand that we all use the expression “Radical Islamic Terrorism.” “Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country,” said the man unfit to lead this country back in September. We can debate later the extent to which simply being white makes one complicit in white supremacy (even if unwillingly). But for now, it seems beyond question that Trump is vastly more complicit in Charlottesville than the hundreds of millions of innocent Muslims that he’s tried to tar are complicit in ISIS.
UPDATE: The leader of the NC KKK has said he was "glad" the murder victim in Charlottesville died, and "they were a bunch of Communists out there protesting against somebody's freedom of speech, so it doesn't bother me that they got hurt at all." He added "I think we're going to see more stuff like this happening at white nationalist events." These are the sorts of morally-bankrupt false equivalencies and threats of violence that Trump implicitly endorses.
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