Interesting clash in the Culture Wars this morning.
On the one hand we have the latest in a staggering long line of ultra right-wing gun fetishists plotting a pissed-off white guy’s jihad against, well, everything, (but mostly “liberals”.) While on the other we have (yet another) chowderhead legislator — right here in Minnesota — zeroing in on an epidemic that only exists in his mind and the FoxNews/InfoWars bubble.
The Coast Guard officer caught stockpiling the usual thousands of rounds of ammo, dozens of guns, drugs and god knows what else is a by now all-too familiar character in contemporary American mythology. (He was caught, in part, by searches he made on his gummint work computer … doh!). This guy was playing the usual role. That of the solitary, righteous, avenging white warrior, prepared to die for racial purity. There’s an endless supply of these guys.
Early reports suggest he was planning something “on a scale rarely seen”. That may be hyperbole based on his truly delusional ranting. (And yes, he too was frothing about restoring the “white homeland”.) But the central point is that he was armed to the teeth enough to pull off something at least as nasty as the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, or the Charleston church massacre, or the … well I’m trying to keep this under 700 words, so you’ll have to Google the rest.
Meanwhile here In Minnesota, we have Republican Representative Nick Zerwas of (deep Sixth District) Elk River simultaneously demagoguing the kind of existential fears that keep your average talk radio jockey in business … fake claims of hate crimes.
(You may want to move it up on your list of things to worry about. Right after, “Did I leave the garden hose out last fall?”).
To be specific, Zerwas is worried about fake claims made by liberals, blacks (or Hispanics, or Muslims or Jews) against, you know, the real victims in this toxic Culture War. Who they? Pissed off, not too bright white folks, that’s who. He even rolls in “liberal bias” in the media to flavor the stew.
Zerwas wants a law criminalizing stuff like this much publicized episode where a TV actor in Chicago staged an attack on him by vicious, racist Trumpers as a publicity stunt. If only we didn’t have video of his buddies stocking up on mugger gear after being paid $3000 to play act the whole thing.
It’s batshit, of course. And the guy — Jussie Smollett (never seen the show he’s in or heard of him until now) — has pretty well toasted his career with this move, not to mention whatever he gets from the courts in Illinois. Stupidity knows no racial or ethnic boundaries.
But, contrary to the bold and righteous Rep. Zerwas, stunts like Smollett’s are not an epidemic that needs immediate legislative action. In fact, the only reason you make a (further) fool of yourself by standing up, in Minnesota, for crissakes, demanding action over the Black Guy in Chicago incident is to gin up a new round of “atta boys” at the bars in Elk River. By god, Mr. Zerwas, if you don’t do a single damn thing to fix the schools or roads out there, you can always tell your people you were on the front lines in the war against asinine publicity stunts!
Needless to say, our Orange Leader, lately raging anew about The New York Times and others in the press as “enemies of the people”, has yet to Twit a word about Sgt. Rock, the Coast Guard dude, and his long list of Democrats and journalists/media people he was preparing to slaughter … with his actual arsenal.
I very much doubt Mr. Zerwas will have anything to say, either. (I doubt he will ever be asked, since that would be too impolite for Capitol conversation.) Because for either Trump or Zerwas to condemn this latest locked and loaded sociopath would be like spitting in the face of the whipped up, saucer-eyed folks in the front row of their West Virginny rallies or Main Street meet-ups.
Basic rule of politics: Never insult the people you need to stay in office.
In raw Culture War terms, one threat is a stark, unequivocal reality with a horrifying real world death toll attached to it. The other is no threat to anyone, other than the way it is reprocessed and reformatted as an offense to a self-pitying racial majority.
In my disorderly archives are old news clippings about the Stewart hoax, when false claims of “Black guy assaults White woman” had Boston’s finest running a law-and-order dragnet for weeks, stop-and-frisk escalating to stop-and-strip; and the tale from New Jersey where a prosecutor (Caucasian) reported he’d been chased and shot at by African-American crack-dealing gangsters–it turned out later to be fiction, but was worth a week’s hysteria on national news. You may recall the sensational impact of the brutal beating and rape suffered by a young white woman in New York’s Central Park, back in the ’80’s. The victim became a national symbol of white peoples’ fear and anger about violent African-American youths. Police interrogators extracted coerced–but false–confessions from five young men. Convicted without physical evidence, the men served terms from 7 to 13 years in prison, branded as rapists. The actual assailant, as DNA tests proved, was identified in 2002, and New York’s D.A. admitted that the Central Park Five had been innocent after all.
Something else. During their trial in 1990, Donald Trump bought large newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for youthful perpetrators of heinous crimes. Even then, Trump was motivated to demagogically exploit a tragic incident in order to instigate race-based fear and hatred. Even then, he flaunted his disrespect for the courts and the judicial process. Even then, he must have had some ulterior design, some embryonic yearning to exercise autocratic political power.
And even after the truth was dislcosed, even after the District Attorney dismissed all charges and had a judge vacate (erase) the convictions, even after five innocent young men’s lives were scarred by long years of undeserved incarceration, Trump expressed no regret or remorse for his lynch-mob-instigating attitude. Trump refused to acknowledge that the five men had been proven innocent, and instead insisted that they looked mighty guilty to him.
Take off the blinders, people. This usurping bastard works the Big Lie technique better than Hitler or Goebbels did.
That the ignorant and bigoted masses blindly follow Trump is tragic but explainable as a manifestation of the mindless mass-conformity characteristic of fascism.
That the educated and privileged elites of the political and economic power structure, represented by the leaders of the Republican Party, continue to collaborate with this dishonest and dishonorable would-be dictator, shows those Republicans to be either cowards, traitors, or fools. Or maybe all three of those.
The hypocrisy you point out about the stunning silence re Lt. Hasson vs. all the noise about Smollett is frightening.