Today I was sitting in a recliner with my two year old child on my lap, when I read these words:
“TRUMP: I will tell you something. I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it. And you had, you had a group on one side that was bad. And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group – you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
REPORTER: Do you think what you call the alt left is the same as neo-Nazis?
TRUMP: Those people – all of those people, excuse me – I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.
REPORTER: Well, white nationalists –
TRUMP: Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So – excuse me – and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
It was about the time that the reporter asked about Trump connecting the Antifa protestors to the Nazis that I began to feel a cold chill. You see, Saturday I was running around, completing chores and paying attention to the news (as I usually do). I was getting ready for our baby shower (kid number two on the way), and then I decided to look at reddit. At the very top, “1 Killed, 19 Wounded by Car Driving into Crowd in Charlottesville.” I clicked on the link and watched this video of a Dodge Challenger rev up as it barreled into a mass of people. I will never forget the sound of their screaming. I was repulsed and horrified. But I’m a millennial. We are used to seeing people die, at this point. I remember distinctly watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11 on my freshman high school writer’s comp class. I wouldn’t say that I got over it, but I moved on.
But then came Trump’s “both sides” comment, and I wanted to scream. I did what we people do and reshared clever status’s and memes on Facebook and twitter. With every hour from that moment I’ve felt this sense of dread creeping up, and with Trump’s most recent statements (and with everyone playing into a tribal narrative) I’ve now feel the need to speak up for the unspoken narrative. There’s are not two sides to this. The Charlottesville Protest may seem, on the surface, to have been a protest around the removal of a Confederate memorial.
It may seem that these were leftist thugs and conservative thugs beating each other up over a bit of stone, but it’s not. The people who felt called to the “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville may be Trump supporters, but they’re not conservative. Hell, they’re not even Republicans, really. They’re fascists. They’re Nazis. Let me explain. These are people who have been outside the political discourse for quite some time, and have latched onto the perceived Fox News “culture war” and liberal “identity politics” to reform and repackage their agenda. You see, Trump — and others — are making a mistake. There are democrats, their are republicans, and then there are these people. Our standard way of thinking about politics, the good ole Left/Right compass, doesn’t account for these people. They exist outside of the American Political Spectrum.
Let’s take a tour of David Duke’s website. The top middle navigation bar is labeled “Jewish Supremacism.” It doesn’t take long to see Mr. Duke blaming all of societies’ ills on the Jews (and I’m not kidding. I’ve read three of his most recent blogs and they all involve the Jews. I’ll just link to this one for good measure). This all being said, Mr. Duke isn’t advocating for another holocaust, he’s just stating that multiculturalism and diversity are bad because they lead to conflict and that, “It is a truism that if you want to reduce ethnic conflict, you must endeavor to give every people the Human right to live and to create society and community in its own values and, that every group respect the right of every other group to do this.”
But before you think he’s just down on Jewish people, he said in his book, “My Awakening,” in chapter 2,
“The standard response of racial egalitarians to the fact that Blacks’ account for only a small percentage of great achievements is that Black societies were not advanced enough or because their societies were “oppressed.” Of course, such an argument is only begging the question, for what could have caused this lack of advancement or habitual “oppression” over thousands of years? If the capabilities for what we call civilization are the same among the races, why did Blacks not develop even one? In all of Black Africa beneath the Sahara, they never developed any writing and never used the wheel! There is today only one vibrant nation, the Republic of South Africa, a nation now heading rapidly to the same fate of the rest of Black Africa with the ongoing removal of White leadership and skills.”
That was written around the time Nelson Mandela rose to power and eliminated the racial Apartheid government that had oppressed the majority of the population of South Africa for decades.
It was people fueled by these beliefs that lit torchs in Charlottesville and marched to a gathering point of protestors chanting “Blood and Soil!” And “Jews will not replace us!” It was these people that laid punches into protestors and fired mace at them. It was these people that shouted, “The heat here is nothing compared to what you’re going to get in the ovens!” These are the people that screamed racial slurs, homophobic slurs, promised to brutalize people, put people on boats, and eventually, it was one of these people that drove a car into a crowd like a ISIS terrorist. Simply put, these people advocate for the removal of extermination of Americans that just so happen to not be white. Don’t believe me, here’s the evidence.
In a fantastic piece in The Atlantic, written by Graeme Wood, a former classmate of Richard Spencer, another prominent fascist, described a piece of an interview he had with Spencer,
“Other targets among the alumni community included Kurt Eichenwald, class of 1979, a Newsweek journalist who had written critically about Trump and the alt-right during the 2016 campaign. Eichenwald suffers from epilepsy, and in December, a Twitter user calling himself @jew_goldstein tweeted a strobe-light gif to him that triggered a series of seizures, leading to temporary partial paralysis on his left side. Spencer blanked on Eichenwald’s name, and both he and the minion laughed as they tried to recall it.
“What is that guy’s name? The one whom we almost killed?”
“No, no,” the minion corrected him, with the precision of in-house counsel. “We did not send that.”
Spencer revised his statement. “We collectively almost killed him. Some alt-right shitlord”—alt-right-speak for “online activist”—“sent him a meme.” Two months later, @jew_goldstein was revealed as John Rivello, 29, of Maryland, and charged with cyberstalking and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. According to the federal criminal complaint, Rivello wrote, in private messages, “I hope this sends him into a seizure” and “Let’s see if he dies.” Spencer retweeted an appeal to crowdfund Rivello’s defense “against lying #fakenews Kurt Kikenwald.” (Eichenwald is Episcopalian.)
These people, these Nazis, don’t believe in representative government. They believe in state control of all things as a way to keep control (regardless of whether they’ll admit it or not). These people have killed. Among domestic terrorists, White Supremacists outnumber deaths from any other domestic terrorist sources 2 to 1 according to the FBI, and with the exception of 9/11 white supremacists were responsible for the most death overall including the second deadliest terrorist attack, the Oklahoma City Bombing. Just today, it was revealed the FBI arrested a man trying to bomb Oklahoma City again! These people have killed and will kill again.
So sure, we can have a discussion about Antifa’s methods, but let their be no mistake, the people responsible for Charlottesville are in the wrong. They chose a city that was already hostile to their presence in order to provoke outrage, and gather the largest amount of attention they could. These people want to destroy the America that we know and love. These people want to kill you neighbors, your friends, your family. These people are not to be sympathized with. The President and the bloggers on the right need to make sure that they’re not including these people into their tribe when discussing them. Pointing blame at the protestors only engenders a sense of victimization of the part of these Nazis, a label they do not deserve. They are victims in the same way ISIS fighters are victims of American drones. They advocate a way of life that is entirely alien of American ideals.
This, ultimately, as Trump asserted, above the removal of Confederate memorials. I am, myself, a student of history and am a southerner by birth. I understand the depth of feeling around the Confederacy in the South. There is a shared sense of heritage when people see a statue of Robert E. Lee. Its a relic of a bygone era, but unfortunately of Jim Crow and not of the historical Confederate South. No one, in fact, but plantation owners would have really celebrated that time in retrospect. The Southern economy was only a few steps above medieval feudalism, with many white farmers only a few steps above slaves themselves, with their fates tied to those who had inherited vast estates and slaves from their predecessors. Revisionist historians and propagandists have for a long time twisted the actual lessons that can be learned from the Civil War as they wrapped themselves around the Stars and Bars, and attempted to find a moral justification for the war that was not bound by racial relations. Personally, I think it’s unwise to remove all vestiges of this period. It wouldn’t erase history, as the legacy of the Civil War and it’s Confederate apologists permeate the South, but there’s something to be said about the will of the people.
Ultimately, that is not really what’s at issue, because the people of Charlottesville, and of many cities that are removing their monuments, are liberal bastions that want these removed. The people who actually live their want them removed. These Nazis and White Supremacists are using these monument removals as a rallying cry for their own propaganda purposes, and the news media and Trump just gave them a win. They speak of “white genocide” like there’s actually an existential threat to white culture. It’s fiction they’ve written themselves.
So, Im asking you America, no, pleading with you, please do not let these people divide us. Don’t let this insidious doctrine poison your soul. These people have let hate for their neighbor consume them. Don’t allow yourself to be a sucker.
