Define, Demonize, Silence, and Purge: How To Battle White Supremacists
When former Trump friend Donny Deutsch said on “Morning Joe” that socialism was the most unAmerican term, I rushed to my I-Pad to tweet that it’s too bad white supremacy is not the most unAmerican term. In fact, it may be the most American term. After the media-generated, lock up the Jews and blacks METOO movement started, I contrasted the treatment of the mostly white women activists in that movement to that of the black women who started the BlackLivesMatter movement. Even when that movement went viral last year after the on camera knee-to-neck murder of George Floyd, it was still being demonized by vile white supremacists like Donald Trump, William Barr, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. The peaceful protesters were being called anarchists and terrorists, and the destruction, looting, and violence caused by white supremacists posing as antifa and opportunistic thugs were blamed on them. Long before 1/6/21, I contrasted the treatment of the unarmed, peaceful BlackLivesMatter protesters, who were being beaten, gassed, and shot with rubber bullets by rioting police officers, to the treatment of the armed white “Liberate Michigan” terrorists who stormed that state capitol. But again the insane white supremacist who finally left the White House has been our best weapon against racism. When he unleashed the mob that I called TRASH (Traitors, Racists, Anarchists, Seditionists, Hoodlums) in my last post (1/17/21), he made violent white supremacy go viral and led President Biden (I love saying that phrase) to declare war on white supremacy and white supremacists. I’m ready to join that battle. In fact, I was battling white supremacy when our new President was hanging out with white supremacist and father of a daughter by his mother’s sixteen-year-old black maid Strom Thurmond during the last three decades of the 20th Century. I know how we can win this battle and make white supremacy the most unAmerican term. We need to define, demonize, silence, and purge white supremacists.
First, we need to distinguish between racism and white supremacy. Racism is a condition like mental illness or asthma; white supremacy is an ideology like socialism. As the anti-racist authors have made clear, all of us are biased, and depending on how we define racist (some suggest it has to involve power), all of us might be racist. I would argue that some of us are racist against our own people. But most racists don’t believe that only white people (some would say only white men) should vote and run our country. Most don’t believe that slavery was okay or a necessary evil or that people of color aren’t real Americans, no matter how long their ancestors have been here and how they came, that they are foreigners. Whether they identify as white supremacists or not, the following Americans, whatever their race, believe in white supremacy: 1) birthers 2) voter suppressors who think black folks and other people of color are cheating when they vote and that a President who doesn’t win the majority of white votes is not a legitimate President 3) people who think slavery and segregation were good for blacks 4) people who think this land was and still is white folks’ land and never belonged to the Native Americans 5) people who think that all brown and yellow people are foreign, and all black people are unpatriotic haters of America.
While some white supremacists like the so-called Proud Boys wear the name proudly, most try to hide their ideology (see the 10/11/20 post) and become incensed when anyone suggests that they could be racist or a white supremacist. I loved seeing Tucker Carlson, who demonizes BlackLivesMatter protesters and defends white supremacists, looking hurt and whining when President Biden declared war on white supremacy. He wanted to know exactly what the President meant by white supremacy and who was a white supremacist. As one social media comic said, “Look in the mirror.” To battle white supremacy, we need to make the term even more toxic so that we can use it against racist conservatives the way they use socialism against progressives. We can do that by contrasting the out of the closet white supremacists to socialists and BlackLivesMatter activists. Socialist AOC and new member of the Squad, BlackLivesMatter activist Cori Bush, can be contrasted to QANON believer, anti-masker, pro-gun rights, white supremacist Marjorie Taylor Greene (my new favorite state Georgia’s one big mistake). The Squad members wear masks to protect themselves and their fellow humans from Covid and don’t carry guns in case they decide to execute a political opponent. AOC has never advocated murdering Bloomberg, Trump, or the Koch brothers, and Representative Bush never shouted “burn the pigs in a blanket.” (Some white supremacists are anti-cop, and they’re the ones who want to kill and cremate police officers. They did kill one Capitol police officer by beating him on the head with a fire extinguisher and injured many others during the 1/6 insurrection.) There are no films of AOC, Bush, or any of the Squad members harassing a teenage mass murder survivor the way Greene harassed gun control activist David Hogg. And nothing they’ve said is as crazy as almost everything Greene has said (a laser started a wildfire in California, for instance). We can also contrast the sometimes armed white supremacists who stormed the Capitol to the peaceful BlackLivesMatter protesters, who didn’t shout “Hang Pence” or leave urine and feces on the White House grounds. White supremacists are clearly crazier, trashier, and more dangerous than socialists or BlackLivesMatter activists, and we have the pictures and videos to prove that point.
The white supremacists are also more dangerous (although not necessarily crazier) and destructive to our culture and democracy than Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and all the men who have been METOOed since 2017. We need to treat them the way we’ve treated powerful, successful, but apparently raunchy, men like Mark Halperin and Matt Lauer. I was outraged when Halperin’s former partner John Heilemann interviewed white supremacist and indicted for fraud (this happened before fellow white supremacist Trump exercised his pardon power) Steve Bannon on Showtime’s political show “The Circus.” Halperin helped create “The Circus” and seemed to be the star, but he hasn’t appeared on the show since it was revealed that he was what my mother would call “a dirty dog,” sexually harassing women behind the scenes. Yet Bannon can be welcomed on the show and allowed to spread his poison? The folks on television need to follow the lead of Twitter and Facebook. Silence the white supremacists. Send them to Parler, Fox, and wherever else vile white supremacists are welcome. Then demonize those media outlets for promoting white supremacy.
If powerful men like Cosby, Weinstein, Halperin, and Lauer can be purged from our culture because of private sexual misbehavior, why can’t we purge white supremacists like Hannity and Carlson? Bill O’Reilly was the highest rated cable news star, but he lost his job on Fox because of his sexual misbehavior behind the scenes. Hannity and Carlson fly their white supremacy flags on camera! Why are they still on television? It’s not enough for them to lose sponsors; they can find new sponsors like that stupid pillow guy. They need to be cancelled. There should be no place for white supremacists on any respectable news media outlet. TIME, NEW YORKER, NBC, ABC, CBS, and all of the other media outlets involved in the 2017 METOO lock up the black and Jewish men movement, demonize white supremacists and demand that they be cancelled. Congress folks who used the METOO movement to get rid of elderly, cognitively impaired Civil Rights icon Representative John Conyers and supporter of women and 2020 presidential frontrunner Senator Al Franken, demand that the white supremacists (Cruz, Hawley, Greene, Jordan, Nunes, Brooks, etc.) resign or at least lose all committee assignments. Military leaders, ban white supremacists the way gay and transgender folks were banned until the progressives ended that discrimination. State, local, and federal agencies, make all new employees (after you purge the old ones) take an oath swearing that they are not white supremacists (that includes people of color since we can be white supremacists just as women can be sexist against women) the way I had to take an oath in 1965 swearing that I was not a Communist before I could work as a temporary federal employee at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. I don’t remember taking such an oath when I was hired to teach high school in Illinois in 1971, and I know I didn’t take that oath when I taught at USC, Tufts, and Cal Poly Pomona in the late seventies, but a friend remembers having to swear she wasn’t a Communist when she was hired to teach at a Los Angeles area elementary school, probably in 1970. All teachers, professors, firemen, and especially police officers need to take an oath swearing that they are not white supremacists before they are hired.
The United States of America was founded on white supremacy. It was written into the Constitution with the dehumanization of my people (3/5 human) and Native Americans. We may never completely eliminate that vile ideology, but Trump and TRASH have made this moment our best chance to defeat it so that no sane American will ever again proudly claim to be a white supremacist. If we define, demonize, silence, and purge white supremacists, they may not “disappear like a miracle,” but they will never again be able to gain so much power and attack our culture and democracy.
First, we need to distinguish between racism and white supremacy. Racism is a condition like mental illness or asthma; white supremacy is an ideology like socialism. As the anti-racist authors have made clear, all of us are biased, and depending on how we define racist (some suggest it has to involve power), all of us might be racist. I would argue that some of us are racist against our own people. But most racists don’t believe that only white people (some would say only white men) should vote and run our country. Most don’t believe that slavery was okay or a necessary evil or that people of color aren’t real Americans, no matter how long their ancestors have been here and how they came, that they are foreigners. Whether they identify as white supremacists or not, the following Americans, whatever their race, believe in white supremacy: 1) birthers 2) voter suppressors who think black folks and other people of color are cheating when they vote and that a President who doesn’t win the majority of white votes is not a legitimate President 3) people who think slavery and segregation were good for blacks 4) people who think this land was and still is white folks’ land and never belonged to the Native Americans 5) people who think that all brown and yellow people are foreign, and all black people are unpatriotic haters of America.
While some white supremacists like the so-called Proud Boys wear the name proudly, most try to hide their ideology (see the 10/11/20 post) and become incensed when anyone suggests that they could be racist or a white supremacist. I loved seeing Tucker Carlson, who demonizes BlackLivesMatter protesters and defends white supremacists, looking hurt and whining when President Biden declared war on white supremacy. He wanted to know exactly what the President meant by white supremacy and who was a white supremacist. As one social media comic said, “Look in the mirror.” To battle white supremacy, we need to make the term even more toxic so that we can use it against racist conservatives the way they use socialism against progressives. We can do that by contrasting the out of the closet white supremacists to socialists and BlackLivesMatter activists. Socialist AOC and new member of the Squad, BlackLivesMatter activist Cori Bush, can be contrasted to QANON believer, anti-masker, pro-gun rights, white supremacist Marjorie Taylor Greene (my new favorite state Georgia’s one big mistake). The Squad members wear masks to protect themselves and their fellow humans from Covid and don’t carry guns in case they decide to execute a political opponent. AOC has never advocated murdering Bloomberg, Trump, or the Koch brothers, and Representative Bush never shouted “burn the pigs in a blanket.” (Some white supremacists are anti-cop, and they’re the ones who want to kill and cremate police officers. They did kill one Capitol police officer by beating him on the head with a fire extinguisher and injured many others during the 1/6 insurrection.) There are no films of AOC, Bush, or any of the Squad members harassing a teenage mass murder survivor the way Greene harassed gun control activist David Hogg. And nothing they’ve said is as crazy as almost everything Greene has said (a laser started a wildfire in California, for instance). We can also contrast the sometimes armed white supremacists who stormed the Capitol to the peaceful BlackLivesMatter protesters, who didn’t shout “Hang Pence” or leave urine and feces on the White House grounds. White supremacists are clearly crazier, trashier, and more dangerous than socialists or BlackLivesMatter activists, and we have the pictures and videos to prove that point.
The white supremacists are also more dangerous (although not necessarily crazier) and destructive to our culture and democracy than Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and all the men who have been METOOed since 2017. We need to treat them the way we’ve treated powerful, successful, but apparently raunchy, men like Mark Halperin and Matt Lauer. I was outraged when Halperin’s former partner John Heilemann interviewed white supremacist and indicted for fraud (this happened before fellow white supremacist Trump exercised his pardon power) Steve Bannon on Showtime’s political show “The Circus.” Halperin helped create “The Circus” and seemed to be the star, but he hasn’t appeared on the show since it was revealed that he was what my mother would call “a dirty dog,” sexually harassing women behind the scenes. Yet Bannon can be welcomed on the show and allowed to spread his poison? The folks on television need to follow the lead of Twitter and Facebook. Silence the white supremacists. Send them to Parler, Fox, and wherever else vile white supremacists are welcome. Then demonize those media outlets for promoting white supremacy.
If powerful men like Cosby, Weinstein, Halperin, and Lauer can be purged from our culture because of private sexual misbehavior, why can’t we purge white supremacists like Hannity and Carlson? Bill O’Reilly was the highest rated cable news star, but he lost his job on Fox because of his sexual misbehavior behind the scenes. Hannity and Carlson fly their white supremacy flags on camera! Why are they still on television? It’s not enough for them to lose sponsors; they can find new sponsors like that stupid pillow guy. They need to be cancelled. There should be no place for white supremacists on any respectable news media outlet. TIME, NEW YORKER, NBC, ABC, CBS, and all of the other media outlets involved in the 2017 METOO lock up the black and Jewish men movement, demonize white supremacists and demand that they be cancelled. Congress folks who used the METOO movement to get rid of elderly, cognitively impaired Civil Rights icon Representative John Conyers and supporter of women and 2020 presidential frontrunner Senator Al Franken, demand that the white supremacists (Cruz, Hawley, Greene, Jordan, Nunes, Brooks, etc.) resign or at least lose all committee assignments. Military leaders, ban white supremacists the way gay and transgender folks were banned until the progressives ended that discrimination. State, local, and federal agencies, make all new employees (after you purge the old ones) take an oath swearing that they are not white supremacists (that includes people of color since we can be white supremacists just as women can be sexist against women) the way I had to take an oath in 1965 swearing that I was not a Communist before I could work as a temporary federal employee at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. I don’t remember taking such an oath when I was hired to teach high school in Illinois in 1971, and I know I didn’t take that oath when I taught at USC, Tufts, and Cal Poly Pomona in the late seventies, but a friend remembers having to swear she wasn’t a Communist when she was hired to teach at a Los Angeles area elementary school, probably in 1970. All teachers, professors, firemen, and especially police officers need to take an oath swearing that they are not white supremacists before they are hired.
The United States of America was founded on white supremacy. It was written into the Constitution with the dehumanization of my people (3/5 human) and Native Americans. We may never completely eliminate that vile ideology, but Trump and TRASH have made this moment our best chance to defeat it so that no sane American will ever again proudly claim to be a white supremacist. If we define, demonize, silence, and purge white supremacists, they may not “disappear like a miracle,” but they will never again be able to gain so much power and attack our culture and democracy.
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