western civ
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maybe belated
2nd 9 24 on leo yikes overton window bannon is bridge? tucker
used to be dog whistle to make racism intellectually/ academically respectable? --> gt replacement?
big range from white power to islamophobe to MAGA to merely nostalgic to legit ari/rhet
alt rt proud boys spencer horowitz bannon tucker
FOX? WATTERS, WILL CAIN
merri ok
2 26 MUNICH SECUR CONF 1 YR AFTER JDV AND MUSK? WENT ALT RT NEO-NAZI, RUBIO GETS APPLAUSE FOR VENEER VERSION
DHS POSTER WHICH WAY WESTERN/AM MAN?
MMA
02/18/26
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01/30/26
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SECULAR APOCALYPSE: WHITE PPL OVERWHELMED BY DARK CRIM HORDES
PROJECTION RUBBER REVERSE? WE DO NOT KILL, THEY DO
POST PRETTI
OMFG ANTI-COMMIE WATERS INGRA HANTY BEFORE SEE BAD TRINITY
MMA
MAGA media demand Trump put down the Minnesota “revolution”
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 01/30/26
A week after Border Patrol officers gunned down nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, MAGA media’s biggest stars are portraying locals who oppose immigration enforcement officers’ brutal tactics as China-backed “revolutionaries” seeking “the complete overthrow of Western civilization” which they are urging President Donald Trump to put down at all costs.
Horrific videos of Pretti’s killing by masked agents of the state whose activities he had been filming spurred a backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration policy, with polls showing eroding support and some Republican officeholders and right-leaning streamers expressing dismay.
Even some commentators on Fox News, which initially plowed ahead in depraved service of the administration’s absurd argument that Pretti was a terrorist threatening the officers’ lives, backed down a bit. After Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade urged the president to send former Fox contributor and White House “border czar” Tom Homan to take control of the situation on Monday, Trump took Kilmeade’s advice, spurring premature media claims of a “pivot.”
But in this tug-of-war over the president’s brainbox, MAGA stars quickly regrouped and urged Trump not to back down, reverting to the language of war that has characterized right-wing media discussions of Minneapolis for weeks. And the tenor of their coverage has only become more disturbing over the course of the week.
Fox host Laura Ingraham, in her opening monologue Thursday night, claimed that the “mobs you've witnessed in Minnesota and in other far-left-wing pockets of America” are composed of “revolutionaries” who “smear and dehumanize as a prelude to the executions.”
Ingraham went on to argue that “behind all this” is “a national network of socialists, communists, and Marxist-Leninists” whose “goal is to destabilize the West and undermine trust in our institutions and eventually dismantle capitalism and replace it with a Marxist communist framework that eliminates private property in favor of state-owned enterprises.”
“So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries?” Ingraham asked. She replied to her own question, claiming, “We defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE and also their funding networks, and by reminding Americans that their safety and U.S. sovereignty will not be negotiated away, not now, not ever.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
Ingraham further argued that the anti-ICE movement has “Chinese fingerprints all over it.”
The following hour, Fox’s Jesse Watters described Minneapolis as “antifa’s new favorite city” and local protesters as an “ICE watch mafia” with its “own socialist supply lines, logistics, and financial benefactors.”
“They're calling Minnesota a testing ground for a domestic revolution,” he added. “This is more than just about immigration. It's about the complete overthrow of Western civilization.”
Democrats want “more Renee Goods and Alex Prettis,” he added. “They think if they can stack enough bodies, Trump's going to back off.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime
Watters later hosted MAGA streamer Tim Pool, who argued that “the terrifying thing about Minnesota” is not that federal officers keep killing civilians, but that “we're looking at a leftist base in this country that are being radicalized.”
“My concern is that there's, there's a bloodlust” among the protesters “that's not going to be satisfied,” he added.
Watters went on to say that “there's a certain faction of the left that wants the violence” and suggested that the media “has a little bit more responsibility in situations like this to calm things down.”
Then on Sean Hannity’s program, the host likewise denounced what he termed “the well-coordinated, well-funded, quote, resistance to ICE investigations in Minnesota,” which he claimed is engaged in “an attack on our very system.”
He went on to describe Democrats’ “current anti-ICE outrage” as “pure political theater,” adding that “ultimately, they want to dissolve our borders and fundamentally transform a country and the people that they despise.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity
The vitriol on Fox’s evening shows is somehow less ominous than that coming from right-wing figures off its airways, though.
Tucker Carlson, who hosts one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, argued on Wednesday’s installment that in
, “we are watching the destruction of the social fabric of the government and potentially of the nation.” He explained that the video of Pretti’s killing “represents chaos” and added: “Chaos is worse than illegal immigration. Chaos is worse than police brutality. Chaos is worse than anything. Chaos equals death. The death of people, the death of the weak, the death of countries.”
Carlson
that Minnesota activists “want the chaos,” adding: “This is proof that what you're watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you're watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.” He further claimed that if that revolution is not stopped, the result will be “civil war” and “killing at scale.”
“We have to hold the line,” Steve Bannon likewise argued on Wednesday. “There can be no de-escalation at all. You don't need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature. Put them under pressure. They're the ones that are cracking.”
“This is an inflection point,” he added. “You blink now and you're going to blink forever. You bend the knee now, you'll bend the knee forever. If we stand in the breach and say, screw you, we're fighting for the country, right?”
And Nick Fuentes, the increasingly prominent white nationalist streamer, argued that if the “radical intervention” Trump is overseeing does not succeed, “all of white civilization just collapses.”
“You have to put yourself in the position of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the year 2100 and look around at your majority-minority country that looks like South Africa, where it's just trash and graffiti and filth and homeless people and vagabonds and criminals,” Fuentes explained. “And then you have to go back in time to now when we can prevent it. And then think about what you're willing to do to stop this. And then killing a stupid fat lesbian and a male nurse doesn't seem so bad, does it?”
“Do you know what 'Sieg Heil’ even means?” he concluded. “It means ‘hail victory.’ And not to go like full Nazi or something, but there is no substitute for victory. We have to win; they have to lose.”
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:{:{01/26/26}:
:{:{01/25/26}:
01/27/26
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October 15, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Will Cain Show
WILL CAIN (HOST): Presenting the image of a smiling 34-year-old, Mamdani chose to talk about affordability, and when forced to talk about crime and justice he did take that moment to apologize to the NYPD. Why? Because this is the real Zohran Mamdani. Take a look on your screen. He once posted "nature is healing" in response to another post about a police officer crying. He also said "the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a threat to public safety." Leave that on your screen for a moment and take that in because that is not the smiling, false version of Zohran Mamdani. That's a man telling the truth, telling you exactly who he is and who he would be as mayor of New York City.
Zohran Mamdani's a man that talks about race. He talks about taxing white people and taxing white neighborhoods. He's openly socialist and obviously communist, and in that way he represents something bigger than just a threat to public safety. He represents a threat to Western civilization. This is the fight of our lifetime, and it's something that spans the continent -- spans the globe, from Germany and France to the UK and finally to the Alamo, the United States of America.
What am I talking about? How about this -- just discovered from past summer in the UK. In the UK, their government put out guidance on the definition of terrorism and how to look for radical extremism. They talked about the concept of cultural nationalism. They defined cultural nationalism as right-wing terrorism. This was what they described as cultural nationalism. It is defined by the government as terrorism motivated by one or more of the following broad ideologies: the idea that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of immigration by certain ethnic and cultural groups. So, if you believe in assimilation, and if you are worried about the future of Western civilization, you are, in the UK, a terrorist.
So, I guess that leaves the fate of Western civilization -- if Europe is to fall -- to us. Right here, the Alamo. The United States of America. That brings us back to who's inside the gates of the Alamo. It is a man like Zohran Mamdani, the front runner for mayor of New York City. And here is what he thinks of Western civilization. Just a few years ago, you can see giving the bird -- it's blurred out, but he's giving the bird to a statue of Christopher Columbus.
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September 3, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): The problem is, you know, this is Western civilization. This is Europe here. We have lost the connective tissue between the United States and Europe. We are now the true beacon of freedom, and we can't lose what we have in Europe. We have to cradle it. We have to nurture it, because if it dies and that flame is extinguished, that's a huge problem for the West, when you see China coming up, when you see the Muslims start to rise up. This culture and this tradition of freedom and liberty and property has to be maintained, and if it's not, bad things are going to happen not just here, to the entire world.
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yikes overton window
an 9 24
pledge one billion
conservative activist Leonard Leo is pledging a major financial investment to "crush liberal dominance" he perceivers in corporate America and the media.
The former executive vice president of the Federalist Society and architect of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court assembled by Donald Trump told the *Financial Times* in a rare interview that his nonprofit Marble Freedom Trust intended to turn its attention – and considerable war chest – to the private sector.
“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the publication.
“Expect us to increase support for organizations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers."
Leo has worked to shape the judiciary for more than two decades with the Federalist Society and played a crucial role in getting three ultra-conservative justices appointed to the Supreme Court during Trump's presidency, but he stepped back from daily operations of that organization after the 2020 election.
He founded Marble the following year with a $1.6 billion donation from electronic device manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, and public financial disclosures show he's spent about $600 million in that organization's first three years.
Leo said his goal was to find “very leveraged, impactful ways of reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilization."
His $1 billion pledge will go toward opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, climate and social concerns in the investment sector and the supposed “debanking” of politically conservative customers, and he intends to invest in an as yet undetermined local media company in the next 12 months.
“The political environment is more topsy-turvy and more uncertain than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” said Leo. “Political investing is not as good a bet as it used to be.”
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CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Here's what's upsetting to me, Heather, is if I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I don't -- I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action? It almost creates thought patterns that are not necessarily wholesome. It creates resentment, doesn't it, Heather? This is not a way to design society.
HEATHER MAC DONALD (GUEST): Yeah. We have to stop being scared by the race hustle. We have to stop --
KIRK: Yes --
MAC DONALD: Being called a racist and just say, sorry, the facts are these. You cannot have racial proportionality and excellence at the same time, not because necessarily there's any inherent difference that -- we don't -- we can put that question aside for now, but just because if you look at the fact that 66% of all Black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic math skills defined as doing geometry -- doing arithmetic or reading a graph, 66% of Black 12th graders don't possess even partial mastery of that. It is absurd to think that if you look at a air traffic control room, which depends on being able to do very fast calculations, being able to handle a lot of data on an instantaneous basis. If that isn't, you know, 13% Black, it's because somewhere there's discrimination going on, that is completely fallacious. It is against what is the obvious fact of the world that we live in, and yet I'm just stunned. Like, when is this gonna end?
:{:{So, at some point, it's gonna end -- especially when young white males say we are not gonna be canceled any longer. We know the facts. We know the fact that this is a society now that has done a 180 degree about face from a period where it was, in fact, white supremacy. When it was, in fact, an apartheid state, when it treated Blacks with gratuitous cruelty, heartlessness, heartbreaking nastiness and sadism, that was the reality, but we are not gonna cop to that reality today.}:
We have to stand up against this, Charlie, because white -- there's no other civilization like Western civilization that is engaged in this deliberate self-immolation. No other culture has turned on itself with such fury. You don't see this happening in China. You don't see it happening in Africa. You don't see it happening in India where those cultures are saying, oh, because we have historically been Chinese or African or Indian, we must be a colonialist, oppressive, apartheid state. No. It's only happening in the West out of some perverse instinct that if we get to the heart of it, we would understand much about Western civilization. But right now, it is a totally suicidal instinct.}:
KIRK: It is. And so, about a minute and a half remaining here, Heather. I was having difficulty persuading somebody who is more in the middle over this because they said, yeah, I don't like the woke stuff, but I don't understand why they're doing it. There must be a good reason. Can you just elaborate in about a minute here, Heather? This is suicide. This is I don't want this to exist any longer.
MAC DONALD: There is something about European civilization that is highly susceptible to blackmail. We are now being blackmailed. The reality is Black privilege, not white privilege. It used to be white privilege. I am not denying that. But for some reason, white civilization has decided to engage in the great replacement theory, and to go down without a fight. And I'm gonna fight, you're gonna fight, Charlie.
KIRK: Yes.
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fox officially authoritarian? sorta ag21 global elite morph, ~ norms
yikes omg
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/
Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history
no lx
Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021
Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.
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Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:
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Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.
In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.
Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.
For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.
The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.
Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)
For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:
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RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.
Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.
For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.
Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:
... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"
These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.
White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.
As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."
Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.
It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.
Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.
In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:
In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...
[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.
Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":
This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.
Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.
For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.
Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.
To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.
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acronym capps
https://quillette.com/2020/09/08/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-a-review
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/
paul r salon
As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante killing of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and widespread conservative defenses of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous charges against protesters, including "terrorism," to the Trump administration's crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for protesters to be charged with sedition.
So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about why such views were myopic: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."
Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment:With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.
Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push for Political Research Associates, "Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.
Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence. Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?
I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.
Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea that post-World War II federal support for civil rights was federal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.
According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.
What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.
You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?
Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing. As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaders who broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.
David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.
In 2008,Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war."The Center for American Progress went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."
That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative at The Social Contract, a white nationalist journal which published Raspail's novel. Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his racial civil war scenario within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety of Christian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, includingTony Perkins, Larry Klayman and Rick Joyner.
In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "symbiotic dance" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the sharing of conspiracy narratives between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.
The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.
John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "Going Full Nazi,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.
You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?
The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.
The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether the political elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies which weaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter") or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").
You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?
The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.
White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.
On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consider any action by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as an existential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.
You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?
In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.
But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.
Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?
Bannon's principal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.
How has this spread through the Trump administration?
The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's immigration policy has been cruel, and as Adam Serwer noted, "cruelty is the point."
You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?
The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official linked to the Tanton anti-immigration network and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.
In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "demographic winter," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.
What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them.
Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.
The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys"during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?
The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and local elected Republican officials, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right. Bruce Wilson and David Neiwert have been tracking that.
The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.
The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.
The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.
BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.
What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?
I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/what-is-more-western-than-democracy-and-concentration-camps/
no lnx
What is more Western than democracy and concentration camps?
Written by Common Dreams September 8, 2019
The West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest virtues, constructed century after century, preoccupied now only with reproducing its own defects and with copying the defects of others, such as authoritarianism and the preemptive persecution of innocents. Virtues like tolerance and self-criticism have never been a weakness, as some now pretend, but quite the opposite: it was because of them that progress, both ethical and material, were possible. Both the greatest hope and the greatest danger for the West can be found in its own heart. Those of us who hold neither “Rage” nor “Pride” for any race or culture feel nostalgia for times gone by, times that were never especially good, but were not so bad either.
Currently, some celebrities from back in the 20th century, demonstrating an irreversible decline into senility, have taken to propagating the famous ideology of the “clash of civilizations”—which was already plenty vulgar all by itself—basing their reasoning on their own conclusions, in the best style of classical theology. Such is the a priori and 19th century assertion that “Western culture is superior to all others.” And, if that were not enough, that it is a moral obligation to repeat it.
From this perspective ofWestern Superiority, the very famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallaciawrote, recently, brilliant observations such as the following: “If in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador and even the veil, so much the worse for them. (…) And if their husbands are so idiotic as to not drink wine or beer, idem.” Wow, that is what I call intellectual rigor. “How disgusting!”—she continued writing, first in the Corriere della Sera and later in her best seller The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli International, 2002), refering to the Africans who had urinated in a plaza in Italy—”They piss for a long time these sons of Allah! A race of hypocrits.”
“Even if they were absolutely innocent, even if there were not one among them who wished to destroy the Tower of Pisa or the Tower of Giotto, nobody who wished to make me wear the chador, nobody who wished to burn me on the bonfires of a new Inquisition, their presence alarms me. It makes me uneasy.” Summing up: even if these blacks were completely innocent, their presence makes her uneasy anyway. For Fallaci, this is not racism, it is “cold, lucid, rational rage.” And, if that were not enough, she offers another ingenious observation with reference to immigrants in general: “And besides, there is something else I don’t understand. If they are really so poor, who gives them the money for the trip on the planes or boats that bring them to Italy? Might Osama bin Laden be paying their way, at least in part?” …Poor Galileo, poor Camus, poor Simone de Beauvoir, poor Michel Foucault.
Incidentally, we should remember that, even though the lady writes without understanding—she said it herself—these words ended up in a book that has sold a half million copies, a book with no shortage of reasoning and common sense, as when she asserts “I am an atheist, thank God.” Nor does it lack in historical curiosities like the following: “How does one accept polygamy and the principle that women should not allow photographs to be taken of them? Because this is also in the Q’uran,” which means that in the 7th century Arabs were extremely advanced in the area of optics. Nor is the book lacking in repeated doses of humor, as with these weighty arguments: “And, besides, let’s admit it: our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and sinagogues, yes or no? Protestant churches are also more beautiful.” As Atilio says, she has the Shine of Brigitte Bardot. As if what we really needed was to get wrapped up in a discussion of which is more beautiful, the Tower of Pisa or the Taj Mahal.
And once again that European tolerance: “I am telling you that, precisely because it has been well defined for centuries, our cultural identity cannot support a wave of immigration composed of people who, in one form or another, want to change our way of life. Our values. I am telling you that among us there is no room for muezzins, for minarets, for false abstinence, for their screwed up medieval ways, for their damned chador. And if there were, I would not give it to them.” And finally, concluding with a warning to her editor: “I warn you: do not ask me for anything else ever again. Least of all that I participate in vain polemics. What I needed to say I have said. My rage and pride have demanded it of me.” Something which had already been clear to us from the beginning and, as it happens, denies us one of the basic elements of both democracy and tolerance, dating to ancient Greece: polemics and the right to respond—the competition of arguments instead of insults.
But I do not possess a name as famous as Fallaci—a fame well-deserved, we have no reason to doubt—and so I cannot settle for insults. Since I am native to an under-developed country and am not even as famous as Maradona, I have no other choice than to take recourse to the ancient custom of using arguments.
Let’s see. The very expression “Western culture” is just as mistaken as the terms “Eastern culture” or “Islamic culture,” because each one of them is made up of a diverse and often contradictory collection of other “cultures.” One need only think of the fact that within “Western culture” one can fit not only countries as different as the United States and Cuba, but also irreconcilable historical periods within the same geographic region, such as tiny Europe and the even tinier Germany, where Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Bach and the skin-heads, have all walked the earth. On the other hand, let’s not forget also that Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan (in the name of Christ and the White Race), Stalin (in the name of Reason and atheism), Pinochet (in the name of Democracy and Liberty), and Mussolini (in his own name), were typical recent products and representatives of the self-proclaimed “Western culture.”
What is more Western than democracy and concentration camps? What could be more Western that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the dictatorships in Spain and Latin America, bloody and degenerate beyond the imagination? What is more Western than Christianity, which cured, saved and assassinated thanks to the Holy Office? What is more Western than the modern military academies or the ancient monasteries where the art of torture was taught, with the most refined sadism, and by the initiative of Pope Innocent IV and based on Roman Law? Or did Marco Polo bring all of that back from the Middle East? What could be more Western than the atomic bomb and the millions of dead and disappeared under the fascist, communist and, even, “democratic” regimes? What more Western than the military invasions and suppression of entire peoples under the so-called “preemptive bombings”?
All of this is the dark side of the West and there is no guarantee that we have escaped any of it, simply because we haven’t been able to communicate with our neighbors, who have been there for more than 1400 years, with the only difference that now the world has been globalized (the West has globalized it) and the neighbors possess the main source of energy that moves the world’s economy—at least for the moment— in addition to the same hatred and the same rencor as Oriana Fallaci. Let’s not forget that the Spanish Inquisition, more of a state-run affair than the others, originated from a hostility to the moors and jews and did not end with the Progress and Salvation of Spain but with the burning of thousands of human beings.
Nevertheless, the West also represents Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights and the struggle for women’s rights. At least the effort to attain them, and the most that humanity has achieved so far. And what has always been the basis of those four pillars, if not tolerance?
Fallaci would have us believe that “Western culture” is a unique and pure product, without the Other’s participation. But if anything characterizes the West, it has been precisely the opposite: we are the result of countless cultures, beginning with the Hebrew culture (to say nothing of Amenophis IV) and continuing through almost all the rest: through the Caldeans, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Hindus, the southern Africans, the northern Africans and the rest of the cultures that today are uniformly described as “Islamic.” Until recently, it would not have been necessary to remember that, while in Europe—in all of Europe—the Christian Church, in the name of Love, was persecuting, torturing and burning alive those who disagreed with the ecclesiastical authorities or committed the sin of engaging in some kind of research (or simply because they were single women, which is to say, witches), in the Islamic world the arts and sciences were being promoted, and not only those of the Islamic region but of the Chinese, Hindus, Jews and Greeks. And nor does this mean that butterflies flew and violins played everywhere. Between Baghdad and Córdoba the geographical distance was, at the time, almost astronomical.
But Oriana Fallacia not only denies the diverse and contradictory compositioon of any of the cultures in conflict, but also, in fact, refuses to acknowledge the Eastern counterpart as a culture at all.“It bothers me even to speak of two cultures,” she writes. And then she dispatches the matter with an incredible display of historical ignorance: “Placing them on the same level, as if they were parallel realities, of equal weight and equal measure. Because behind our civilization are Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Phidias, among many others. There is ancient Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. There is ancient Rome with its grandeur, its laws and its conception of the Law. With its sculpture, its literature and its architecture. Its palaces and its amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges and its roads.”
Is it really necessary to remind Fallaci that among all of that and all of us one finds the ancient Islamic Empire, without which everything would have burned—I am talking about the books and the people, not the Colliseum—thanks to centuries of ecclesiastical terrorism, quite European and quite Western? And with regard to the grandeur of Rome and “its conception of the Law” we will talk another day, because here there is indeed some black and white worth remembering. Let’s also set aside for the moment Islamic literature and architecture, which have nothing to envy in Fallaci’s Rome, as any half-way educated person knows.
Let’s see, and lastly? “Lastly—writes Fallaci—there is science.A science that has discovered many illnesses and cures them. I am alive today, for the time being, thanks to our science, not Mohammed’s. A science that has changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone, the television… Well then, let us ask now the fatal question: and behind the other culture, what is there?”
The fatal answer: behind our science one finds the Egyptians, the Caldeans, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Jews and the Africans. Or does Fallaci believe that everything arose through spontaneous generation in the last fifty years? She needs to be reminded that Pythagoras took his philosophy from Egypt and Caldea (Iraq)—including his famous mathemetical formula, which we use not only in architecture but also in the proof of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity—as did that other wise man and mathematician Thales. Both of them travelled through the Middle East with their minds more open than Fallaci’s when she made the trip. The hypothetical-deductive method—the basis for scientific epistemology—originated among Egyptian priests (start with Klimovsky, please), zero and the extraction of square roots, as well as innumerable mathematical and astronomical discoveries, which we teach today in grade school, were born in India and Iraq; the alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians (ancient Lebanese), who were also responsible for the first form of globalization known to the world.
The zero was not an invention of the Arabs, but of the Hindus, but it was the former who brought it to the West. By contrast, the advanced Roman Empire not only was unfamaliar with zero—without which it would be impossible to imagine modern mathematics and space travel—but in fact possessed an unwieldy systemof counting and calculation that endured until the late Middle Ages. Through to the early Renaissance there were still businessmen who used the Roman system, refusing to exchange it for Arabic numerals, due to racial and religious prejudices, resulting in all kinds of mathematical erros and social disputes.
Meanwhile, perhaps it is better to not even mention that the birth of the Modern Era began with European cultural contact—after long centuries of religious repression—first with Islamic culture and then with Greek culture. Or did anyone think that the rationalism of the Scholastics was a consequence of the practice of torture in the holy dungeons? In the early 12th century, the Englishman Adelard of Bath undertook an extensive voyage of study through the south of Europe, Syria and Palestine. Upon returning from his trip, Adelard introduced into under-developed England a paradigm that even today is upheld by famous scientists like Stephen Hawking: God had created Nature in such a way that it could be studied and explained without His intervention. (Behold the other pillar of the sciences, rejected historically by the Roman Church.) Indeed, Adelard reproached the thinkers of his time for having allowed themselves to be enthralled by the prestige of the authorities—beginning with Aristotle, clearly. Because of them he made use of the slogan “reason against authority,” and insisted he be called “modernus.” “I have learned from my Arab teachers to take reason as a guide—he wrote—but you only adhere to what authority says.” A compatriot of Fallaci, Gerardo de Cremona, introduced to Europe the writings of the “Iraqi” astronomer and mathematician Al-Jwarizmi, inventor of algebra, of algorithms, of Arabic and decimal calculus; translated Ptolemy from the Arabic—since even the astronomical theory of an official Greek like Ptolemy could not be found in Christian Europe—as well as dozens of medical treatises, like those of Ibn Sina and Irani al-Razi, author of the first scientific treatise on smallpox and measles, for which today he might have been the object of some kind of persecution.
We could continue listing examples such as these, which the Italian journalist ignores, but that would require an entire book and is not the most important thing at the moment.
What is at stake today is not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and foreign, but—and perhaps above all—protecting the West from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years, if we do not react in time.
The seed is there and it only requires a little water. I have heard dozens of times the following expression: “the only good thing that Hitler did was kill all those Jews.” Nothing more and nothing less. And I have not heard it from the mouth of any Muslim—perhaps because I live in a country where they practically do not exist—nor even from anyone of Arab descent. I have heard it from neutral creoles and from people of European descent. Each time I hear it I need only respond in the following manner in order to silence my interlocutor: “What is your last name? Gutiérrez, Pauletti, Wilson, Marceau… Then, sir, you are not German, much less a pure Aryan. Which means that long before Hitler would have finished off the Jews he would have started by killing your grandparents and everyone else with a profile and skin color like yours.” We run the same risk today: if we set about persecuting Arabs or Muslims we will not only be proving that we have learned nothing, but we will also wind up persecuting those like them: Bedouins, North Africans, Gypsies, Southern Spaniards, Spanish Jews, Latin American Jews, Central Americans, Southern Mexicans, Northern Mormons, Hawaiians, Chinese, Hindus, and so on.
Not long ago another Italian, Umberto Eco, summed up a sage piece of advice thusly: “We are a plural civilization because we permit mosques to be built in our countries, and we cannot renounce them simply because in Kabul they throw Christian propagandists in jail (…) We believe that our culture is mature because it knows how to tolerate diversity, and members of our culture who don’t tolerate it are barbarians.”
As Freud and Jung used to say, that act which nobody would desire to commit is never the object of a prohibition; and as Boudrillard said, rights are established when they have been lost. The Islamic terrorists have achieved what they wanted, twice over. The West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest virtues, constructed century after century, preoccupied now only with reproducing its own defects and with copying the defects of others, such as authoritarianism and the preemptive persecution of innocents. So much time imposing its culture on the other regions of the planet, to allow itself now to impose a morality that in its better moments was not even its own. Virtues like tolerance and self-criticism never represented its weakness, as some would now have it, but quite the opposite: only because of them was any kind of progress possible, whether ethical or material. Democracy and Science never developed out of the narcissistic reverence for its own culture but from critical opposition within it. And in this enterprise were engaged, until recently, not only the “damned intellectuals” but many activist and social resistance groups, like the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, the unions in the 20th century, investigative journalism until a short time ago, now replaced by propaganda in these miserable times of ours. Even the rapid destruction of privacy is another symptom of that moral colonization. Only instead of religious control we will be controlled by Military Security. The Big Brother who hears all and sees all will end up forcing upon us masks similar to those we see in the East, with the sole objective of not being recognized when we walk down the street or when we make love.
The struggle is not—nor should it be—between Easterners and Westerners; the struggle is between tolerance and imposition, between diversity and homogenization, between respect for the other and scorn and his annihilation. Writings like Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride are not a defense of Western culture but a cunning attack, an insulting broadside against the best of what Western culture has to offer. Proof of this is that it would be sufficient to swap the word Eastern for Western, and a geographical locale or two, in order to recognize the position of a Taliban fanatic. Those of us who have neither Rage nor Pride for any particular race or culture are nostalgic for times gone by, which were never especially good or especially bad.
A few years ago I was in the United States and I saw there a beautiful mural in the United Nations building in New York, if I remember correctly, where men and women from distinct races and religions were visually represented—I think the composition was based on a somewhat arbitrary pyramid, but that is neither here nor there. Below, with gilded letters, one could read a commandment taught by Confucius in China and repeated for millenia by men and women throughout the East, until it came to constitute a Western principle: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In English it sounds musical, and even those who do not know the language sense that it refers to a certain reciprocity between oneself and others. I do not understand why we should scratch that commandment from our walls—founding principle for any democracy and for the rule of law, founding principle for the best dreams of the West—simply because others have suddenly forgotten it. Or they have exchanged it for an ancient biblical principle that Christ took it upon himself to abolish: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Which at present translates as an inversion of the Confucian maxim, something like: do unto others everything that they have done to you—the well-known, endless story.
First translated in 2007 by Bruce Campbell, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota
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AN c de v
Last week during a rally in the border city of El Paso, Texas, before thousands of his most adoring fans, Donald Trump showed America and the world–again–who he really is. Trump worked his audience up into a fever pitch as he lambasted and threatened the news media and free press. For Trump and his movement, they are the “enemy of the people.” This is a fundamental principle of authoritarianism. One of Trump’s MAGA hat-wearing supporters responded to the president’s incitement by physically attacking a BBC cameraman named Ron Skeans.
During the same speech, Donald Trump lied about his imaginary wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and about “illegal immigrants” who come to America in order to commit crimes against white people. He spun vainglorious stories out of whole cloth about his “accomplishments” and “greatness.”
Donald Trump’s values and beliefs may appear incoherent, but they are not a buffet or à la carte meal from which a person can pick and choose from. Rather, they are a nasty, incestuous knot that cannot be easily untangled. Ultimately, to wear Donald Trump’s MAGA hats or his other regalia is to share and endorse his racism, sexism, nativism, bigotry and anti-social behavior. To utter the words “Make America Great Again” with no sense of irony or foreboding is to announce one’s betrayal of human decency and distrust of democracy.
How do Trump’s MAGA hats and other clothing and slogans help to create a sense of political community for his followers? Is “Make America Great Again” an implicit threat against nonwhites, Muslims and others that he and his followers deem to be a type of enemy Other?Does Trumpism represent larger cultural battles in America about the role of academics, teachers, intellectuals and other experts in public life? Should Trump’s supporters be held morally accountable for their political decision-making and the harm that they are causing to American society?
In an effort to answer these questions I spoke with Matthew A. Sears, an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick. Sears’ essays have also been featured by the Washington Post and the History News Network. His most recent column for the Washington Post is “Why the decision to wear MAGA hats matters.”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Professors and other educators who speak out about the threat to democracy embodied by Donald Trump and his movement have been victims of a coordinated campaign of threats and violence — including being fired from their jobs. Trumpism and the American right have birthed a type of new McCarthyism and anti-intellectualism in America. As a professor who studies literature and history, and also writes for a popular audience, how has that impacted you?
I don’t know if it is “anti-intellectual” per se, in the spirit of what we saw in fascist Italy or with the Khmer Rouge, the latter being an obvious and odious example. But there is certainly a kind of battle royale taking place between different kinds of intellectuals in America and the West.
There are people like [white nationalist leader] Richard Spencer who try to give themselves an air of academic respectability. These types try to claim that their positions are actually well-thought out, well-researched and well-sourced. They are trying to piggy-back on academic prestige.
There is the so-called “intellectual dark web.” These are all academics or academic-adjacent people. Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein, even Steven Pinker increasingly, and people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris can be included in that group.
This is a battle for the soul of public discourse and who gets to claim expertise on certain areas. Given my expertise and public voice, I am part of a public debate and fight over keeping or getting rid of “traditional” ideas of Western civilization and arguments and beliefs such as “The West is Best.”
As a classics professor who talks about, writes about and teaches about the Greeks and the Romans, for many of the “alt-right” or “alt-lite”I am often seen as a traitor. Why? Because I research and show how those societies were complex, problematic and different from our own. Studying ancient Greece and Rome can show us ways of how not to act and how not to organize a society. These “alt-right” and “alt-lite” types say I am “ruining” Western civilization and I’m “ruining” the classics because I don’t engage in hero worship where I say things like, “Look at these great founders of democracy, and look at these heroes like Achilles and Julius Caesar and these great men.”
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Tradition, Family and Property, the right-wing Catholic group whose red-caped activists are regularly a very visible presence at Religious Right gatherings, includes in its Crusade Magazine an interviewwith the author of a TFP-published book, “Islam and the Suicide of the West: The Origin, Doctrine, and Goals of Islam.”
The author, Luiz Solimeo, argues that the West is committing suicide by admitting “masses of Muslim immigrants and ‘refugees.’” Unlike 19th and 20th Century immigrants to the U.S., who sought to assimilate and contribute to the local culture, Solimeo says, current Muslim immigrants in Europe “want to destroy this civilization and impose their own doctrine and sharia law on the world.”
In a commentary posted on TFP’s website the same day as the Solimeo interview, John Horvat, the head of the U.S. arm of TFP, decries “the postmodern mania for diversity.” Horvat argues that the phrase inscribed on American money—e pluribus unum, or “out of many, one”—is in jeopardy because there’s not enough of an “unum” to hold us together.
The solution is a return to the ideas of human dignity as expressed in “Christian civilization”:
The American order only makes sense if it rests upon the many solid principles and ideas inherited from Western Christian civilization. Defense of human dignity is only possible by resorting to a rich treasury of many Christian traditions, morals and standards that buttress true dignity. American culture can only be called culture when it is based on a unified canon of many works and literature that helps America define itself. …
What is needed now is a powerful new unumaround which a pluribusmight form. And that unummust involve a return to the well-spring of Christian civilization. A return to an order governed by God’s Providence is the only thing powerful enough to make America e pluribus unumagain.
Horvat’s book “Return to Order” expressed nostalgia for the Catholic feudalism of medieval Europe and called for a return to an “organic Christian society.”
TFP actively opposes the advance of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. In 2013, it linked tornadoes in Illinois to the state’s approval of a marriage equality bill. A few years ago it railed against the presence of gay Republican group GOProud at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying “How can GOProud consider itself conservative when it directly opposes the work of social conservative activists and contributes to America’s moral ruin, through the weakening of the family – the first and fundamental building block of society?”
Tags: John HorvatAnti-IslamChristian NationImmigrationTradition Family and Property
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Where Is the Study of Western Civilization?
If we take the nation’s history in a broader sense, that history is a part of the history of Western
civilization, the civilization that in large part made it what it is. Yet here too, not one of the UC campuses
requires any coursework in the history of Western civilization. Even more disturbing is the fact that there
is not a single history department on any of the campuses that requires a survey course in Western
civilization of its history majors. And most shocking of all, on almost all campuses (the exceptions being
UCLA and UC Davis) Western civilization courses are simply not offered at all.
Until recently, a reasonable knowledge of the history of Western civilization was considered an
important attribute of a well-educated person. A powerful case can be made for the wisdom of
that attitude. First, we are all children of the Western tradition – it has made us who we are. To
understand where we came from, students must certainly understand the political, scientific, and artistic
44 This was in an NAS report: “The Vanishing West, 1964-2010. The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American
Undergraduate Curriculum,” issued May 2011, http://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheVanishingWest.pdf.
48 | A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE
NAS
achievements of ancient Greece, and how these have developed and changed over time until they
resulted in the way we live now. The National Association of Scholars’ recent study puts the matter thus:
“In studying the rise of the West, students came to grips with how the arts and sciences encountered
in other classes had been shaped.” Modernity – that is, the form of life that has spread and is still
spreading across the globe – has to a very large extent been shaped by the Western tradition. Again,
the NAS study puts the point well:
Western Civilization has transformed the human condition. This remains
invisible or at best gropingly understood by students who have had no chance
to study systematically the rise of the West, which brings into focus better
than anything else the origins and development of a sophisticated worldwide
marketplace; an impersonal, rule-based bureaucracy; the scientific outlook;
modern medicine, lengthened life-spans, democracy and constitutionalism, and
the massive increase in material abundance….Studying the history of the West
brings a student to grips, as nothing else can, with the roots, the shaping events,
the underlying causes of the process and substance of globalization, indeed, of
the creation of modernity itself.
This positive assessment of the Western tradition would also be found debatable by the radical political
culture of the campuses, and once again the response must be: where is the debate? But if that debate
were to take place, the incoherence of this vehement opposition to the Western tradition would soon
emerge. For the cherished ideas of campus radicals are all very Western ideas, and the thinkers who
developed them are all solidly part of the Western tradition. Radicals charge the West endlessly with
racism, sexism, class oppression, and imperialism. Yet radical egalitarianism is based on the ideas of
Rousseau and Marx, the abolition of the world-wide practice of slavery was a European cause and
achievement, equal rights for women was fought for and achieved in the West, and it was the European
Enlightenment that led to the end of empires. Properly understood, the place in the spectrum of
political ideas that campus political radicalism occupies is that of a Western extremist, the exact opposite
of an anti-Westerner. Suppose that we ask the question: what is the history of the radical left? There is
only one place to go to find its origins. It is part of the history of the Western tradition. A good course in
the Western tradition might be of great benefit to these confused Western extremists. They might then
realize that they are not attacking the Western tradition from without, but on the contrary pressing for a
more extreme version of its ideas from within.
We can recognize the need for debate on all of these issues, but one fact remains. Ignorance of the
salient events in the history of the great civilization that has made us who we are is, quite simply,
ignorance.
Within particular disciplines there are still more bizarre curricular choices that stunt a student’s
education, but most of these are only offshoots of the confused and misdirected campus hostility
to the Western tradition. On several campuses it is now possible to graduate with a major in English
A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 49
NAS
literature without having read a word of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. If this were simply the result
of a trendy aversion to dictating to students what they must do, that would be bad enough; but it is
not. At UC San Diego, for example, while the literature major does not specifically require a course on
Shakespeare, it certainly does require that all majors must have done a survey course in either Chicano
literature, African-American Literature, or Asian-American literature. This is political correctness taken to
the point of caricature. Political choices come first, while great writers can be ignored. A major in English
literature should at the very least make sure that students are exposed to the greatest English-speaking
writers, because with that they will gain a mastery of the subtleties of their native language as well as
an acquaintance with some of the greatest minds in history. But in the current campus culture these
considerations are trumped by the familiar theme of ethnicity and victimhood.
Another example of a major program degraded by a bizarre curricular choice can be seen in the case
of political science. One might assume that any student majoring in political science would of necessity
devote much time, thought, and coursework to the constitution and political history of this nation. First,
because of its intrinsic importance as the longest-running essentially unchanged political system in
the world; second, because it is at the moment the most influential; third, because it represents the
culmination of centuries of European political thought; and fourth, because that is the system that they
live with. But on several campuses, a student can graduate as a major in political science and never
have taken a course in American politics. Only a quite extraordinary degree of alienation could have
produced this absurd result.
If omissions are bizarre and educationally damaging, inclusions can be just as bewildering. Take,
for example, the proliferation of courses on Karl Marx at UC Santa Cruz. The politics department
has an introductory class on Marx, but so does the sociology department, the community studies
department, the legal studies department, and the history of consciousness department. Several of
these departments have a number of other courses on Marxism too. No other political thinker has a
course devoted exclusively to his thought. It is as if the news that Marxism is now an obsolete system of
thought after disastrous results in so many countries had not reached the campus.45 Adolescent Marxist
nostalgia still evidently reigns on campus and impedes a return to reality – but where are the adults
who might be pointing out that it is time to grow up and move on to thinkers who have been able to
withstand the test of time and to remain more relevant to modern life? There is little doubt that these
bizarre curricular choices and omissions result from a lack of political diversity among the faculty.
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LEARN MORE & GET INVOLVED image description
THE POPE CENTER FOR HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY
Broadening intellectual diversity on campus, increasing the value of a college degree, and serving as a watchdog of resources in the university system: These attributes, and many more, characterize the Pope Center for Higher...
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Almost every single time I start checking out some flashy new Conservative organization, it ends up being a "Seven Degrees of Sarah Scaife" game. Which is one of the huge foundations that fund various right-wing "think-tanks" that peddle corporate misinformation, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. In this case, it only takes about four degrees to connect the dots between these mega-funders and the new "student organization" that has plunged UNC Chapel Hill into controversy lately, the Youth for Western Civilization.
The middle dot in this connection is the Leadership Institute out of Arlington Virginia:
http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/...
The Leadership Institute's mission is to identify, recruit, train, and place conservatives in politics, government, and the media.
The head guru of this indoctrination facility (they actually have a dorm) is Morton Blackwell, who's been training future Conservative leaders like Karl Rove for decades. He was also a co-founder of Moral Majority, a close associate of the DeVos family, and is the Chairman of the Virginia Republican National Committee.
If there are any UNC administrators reading this, please pay close attention to this Salon article from 2005:
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Programis simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
Unlike chapter-based political organizations, CLP clubs are unaffiliated with either the Leadership Institute or each other. According to Blackwell, this trait offers a serious advantage: "No purges." The clubs' independence also comes with the benefit of plausible deniability. "You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees University of Miami senior Sarah Canale, whose CLP-organized Advocates for Conservative Thought threw an affirmative action bake sale last year in which the price of a cupcake varied according to the race of its buyer. That it was controversial, she believes, was a victory in itself.
The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty.
Sound familiar? Do you understand now, Chancellor Thorp? You're not dealing with a free speech issue, you're dealing with kids who have been recruited and trained by an organization to bring about exactly what happened.
** Nix previous self-righteous tirade. It appears the six who were arrested at the Virgil Goode speech were not students or faculty, they were adults living in the area who went there to protest/disrupt. There's already too much off-campus influence at play here, and the students need to be left alone so they can work this out in their own way.**
If you're still not convinced, let's look at the Leadership Institute's financial statement, which shows that, for last year alone, they spent $4,605,859 on their Campus Leadership Program:
http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/...
http://www.thecampusright.com/...
The National Field Program identifies and recruits conservative students on college campuses and helps them organize independent conservative groups and publications.
These independent groups and publications fight back against the radical leftists who dominate the faculty, administration, and campus life at the majority of American colleges.
Here's a few snippets from their blog, the Campus Right:
http://www.thecampusright.com/
The Leadership Institute's Deputy Field Director, Kevin DeAnna, is the founder of Youth for Western Civilization.
The Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) chapter at UNC Chapel Hill, a Campus Leadership Program group, brought Tom Tancredo to speak on campus on April 14, 2009.
And if you're still not convinced the Leadership Institute is directly responsible for your recent troubles, how about some proof that there was a financial incentive involved?
LI offers conservative groups a chance to showcase their campus activism skills as they compete with other groups for a Conservative Campus Activism Scholarship Award.
First Place is $2,000, Second Place is $1,000, and Third Place is $500. And if you look at a few of the questions asked on the application for said award, you'll get an idea of what they expect from the winners:
http://www.thecampusright.com/...
- Was their any opposition from other students, campus police or faculty? How did you respond?
- What did your group do to earn media coverage?
That pretty much sums it up. What happened at UNC was not a fluke or an aberration of student behavior, it was an event orchestrated from without by powerful people with an agenda. And I have a feeling this story is far from over.
Part II: While doing my research before posting this diary at BlueNC a few days ago, I came across some pretty strong hints that our resident right-wing stink-tank and astroturf conglomerate Civitas/John Locke Foundation (see Art Pope Puppetmaster) was somehow involved in this. I've learned that, when dealing with these folks in particular, there's no such thing as a coincidence:
The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy says critics of a proposed "Studies in Western Cultures" minor at the University of North Carolina--to be funded by the center's benefactor, theJohn William Pope Foundation--are "fearful radicals." But faculty who wrote the proposal are among those asking university administrators to take a stronger stand against the Pope Center's attacks on UNC curriculum. Reid Barbour, chair of the committee that developed the "Studies in Western Cultures" proposal, says he is proud of his team's work, but is uncomfortable with the donors' ties to the Pope Center.
The Pope Center has also been outspoken about what it says is a lack of attention to the teaching of Western Civilization at UNC as compared to multiculturalism. Since word of the proposed Pope-funded curriculum in Western Cultures broke last month, faculty and students have voiced concerns that allowing a political critic of the university to pay for changes in the curriculum will harm the school's academic integrity.
"The Pope Center is attacking members of our faculty with hostility, and I want it to stop," he says. "I would like to see the administration go to the Popes and ask for the attacks to stop or for the Popes to distance themselves" from those attacks.
Now, this curriculum controversy has been ongoing for 4-5 years, and UNC Chapel Hill isn't the only university that Pope is trying to subvert. But the theme of elevating Western Studies while stifling multicultarism seems to be one of the main missions of the newly-formed Youth for Western Civilization:
http://www.westernyouth.org/...
Youth for Western Civilization will educate, organize and train activists on campuses across the nation to create a culture that will promote the survival of Western Civilization and pride in Western heritage. This movement is focused on the support of Western history, identity, high culture, and pride and opposition to radical multiculturalism, political correctness, racial preferences, mass immigration, and socialism.
And thanks to my intrepid fellow BlueNC blogger Greg Flynn, we now know that the Pope Foundation has donated some $110,000 to the Leadership Institute over the last three years.Which could mean (I'm still not 100%) that the appearance of this borderline White Supremacist student group is part of this older battle between the Pope Foundation and the "radical leftist" faculty at UNC. If so, it was a pretty smart move by Art Pope. The school has been embarrassed and ridiculed, several students have been arrested for speaking their minds, and now speakers who are paid to spew their racist viewpoints on immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism are on the verge of being granted unlimited access to the UNC campus.
Originally posted at BlueNC
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