Bishop: Have an Alt-Thanksgiving
Thursday, November 24, 2016
When Henry Gibson adopted the Hitler salute for his cameo as an Illinois Nazi in The Blues Brothers, there was nothing to do but laugh. Life imitated art last week when Richard Spencer and his white nationalist crowd followed suit. But one has to wonder if the joke isn’t on them.
Half the country appears ready to spend a Thanksgiving in fear of the alt-right, and the half they are afraid of wonders what the heck is the alt right. Above all, it is such absurdist theater, it is difficult to take any of it seriously. Both those decrying it and those declaiming it are giving the alt right far more credit than it deserves – which is just the currency it trades on. It isn’t that there aren’t white nationalists who feel flush with victory, it is their sheer irrelevance that is hilarious.
Well before Richard Spencer coined the phrase in 2008, Rhode Island was at the epicenter of the yet unnamed alt right movement when Jason Mattera and fellow College Republicans at Roger Williams University instituted the first Whites Only Scholarship.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe State Republican Party threw a hissy fit and revoked the charter of the student group. But here is where folks should have begun to suspect this pushback against political correctness wasn’t intended to circle the wagons of white privilege, but to poke fun at the extent to which multiculturalism and tribal solidarity excluded white culture. If the slightest vestigial expression on behalf of white Christian tradition was on its way to becoming a micro-aggression, why not just go all in for a macro-aggression?
Mattera’s scholarship was successfully designed, with a youthful lack of decorum, to goad critics into exasperated paroxysms, i.e. turn our guilt-ridden white folks red in the face.
That is the alt right – willing to say and do almost anything for shock value. Little wonder that this is the movement that spawned the “Dangerous Faggot Tour” for Milo Yiannopolus, the gay gadfly who has taken Spencer’s label and run with it. While this pop culture icon doesn’t approve of the white supremacists who occupy a corner of the stage he has seized, he says of Spencer: ““I don’t see it as a bad thing that I surround myself with edgy people. . . . Because they’re interesting. I’m not going to not hang out with someone because the New York Times calls him racist.”
The mainstream media eat this stuff up like Halloween candy, yet with such earnest sincerity that fake news and real news merge. They seem to have no clue that within the tiny world of alt right trolls, the vast majority are just trying to get their goat. Yiannopolis hit pay dirt when Hillary Clinton, in her August 25th speech in Reno, Nevada ‘tying’ Donald Trump to white nationalists, cited two of his Breitbart stories:
Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy
Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer
Joel Stein who was watching the speech with Yiannopolis for a would be Bloomberg expose observed: “[Yiannopolis] wrote outrageous headlines trying to provoke liberals, and the world’s top liberal read them with head-shaking seriousness, falling for the prank.”
Richard Spencer takes himself very seriously . . . you object. But, no one else does!
Apparently, very few in the media have recovered from the rope a dope of the election and the alt right meme is full steam ahead in their coverage of the Trump Transition -- which promises to be every bit as incisive as their coverage of the election.
Now making the rounds on facebook: homage to Dan Rather who is in just the high dudgeon that pleases alt right provocateurs. “An American Treasure” a friend of mine crows about his lame same-old send up of all things Trump. How exactly is the man who kicked the legs out from under American journalism and let his own confirmation bias reign as the death knell for the mainstream media a national treasure?
For reasons of our Democratically dominated and intellectually ossified state governance and congressional delegation, GoLocalProv recently reported we may be the least influential state in the nation. Yet the Governor and Mayor of Providence seem intent on making their domains appear as if concentration camps of victims. If the alt right has its way, we’ll be laughing stocks to boot.
Council of Churches executive, Reverend Donald Anderson, emerged from the Governor’s recently convened group therapy session with religious leaders to opine that Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was what we all had to fear. Just what we need, an invitation for a council of the barely religious warning that devout Christians are a scourge on the earth. We too lie awake nights wondering whether the worst might come true and some bakery might refuse a cake for a gay wedding.
This is just the kind of thing that convinces people of good will that gay marriage is an attack on their norms and not an effort to bring dignity to sincere relations that poses no threat to tradition. If you pick culture wars like this, you have to expect people to fight back, because believing in one’s own traditions is not bigotry.
Indeed, liberal essayist Mark Lilla criticized the Democratic party’s reliance on identity politics in the wake of the election, writing in the New York Times:
“The whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. . . .Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”
If the Ku Klux Klan should rear its ugly head in Rhode Island, we will be the first to denounce it. But some small spate of unwelcome racial epithets sporadically tossed out by young men who go home to their parent's basement each night are hardly the stuff of race wars or slavery redux. There will surely be policies of the Trump administration that progressives will find unwelcome, but racism is not the calling card of this administration.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, fighting overregulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
Related Slideshow: Winners and Losers - 2016 Election
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