Get me off this planet.
There are people who believe that at the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearing yesterday, a woman seated behind Kavanaugh made a “white supremacist” hand signal.
And then there are people like me, who think one would have to be completely tone-deaf and ignorant of American society and politics to entertain this thought for even a moment.
In my world, “white supremacists” and “Nazis” are completely marginalized and without influence. No CEO or corporate board would touch them or their causes with a barge pole. They have zero representation in academia. They have zero representation in the media. And yes, they have zero representation in politics (no, Paul Ryan is not a “white supremacist,” and neither — to a non-hysterical person, anyway — is Donald Trump, who favors and supports antidiscrimination law).
When such a person tries to deliver a public lecture, he is often shouted down and prevented from speaking.
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When someone is identified with “white supremacy” he is demonized and ostracized, and his career is destroyed.
If we truly lived in a “white supremacist” society, wouldn’t the term be a badge of honor rather than an act of professional suicide?
Unless you’re a hypochondriac by temperament, therefore, I’d say you can safely go about your life as if such people do not exist.
Meanwhile, you can be one of the most bellicose members of the U.S. Senate in American history, urging war and destruction on a horrific scale, and America will come to a halt for ten days to mourn the passing of a great statesman — with even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praising your statesmanship and decency, well beyond the perfunctory and customary messages of sympathy we might otherwise have expected.
Even Jesse Jackson — remember him? — called McCain “one of the heroes of our time.” So no, McCain didn’t have forbidden views on issues like immigration; all he did was cheer on military terror all over the world, often while barely understanding the sides involved in the fighting.
Of the two phenomena to be concerned about — (1) a minuscule group of completely demonized people, mostly imaginary, who can barely hold on to a platform for their message, and who are despised by nearly all Americans or (2) real sociopaths, the latter of whom are praised by the Establishment as the very model for others to emulate, and who are openly admired by many of our fellow countrymen — I think I’m going with the second one.
In the progressive universe, things are different. Here, “Nazis” and “fascists” are a dangerous political force. In the progressive universe it’s normal and sensible to accuse libertarians of fascism; just today I was told on Twitter that my libertarian/ancap philosophy “skews so closely to fascism.” So we are to ignore all the fascist theorists — you know, the actual people who developed the idea — of the 1930s who insisted that the state was the central instrument of their program.
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We are likewise to believe that the Trump base — consisting of tens of millions of people — is at least broadly in sympathy with these causes.
So let’s see if we can follow the logic of all this.
According to these very people, Trump was elected as a result of deliberately engineered racial polarization, and a major ingredient in his success was the support of “white supremacists.”
Let’s be sports about this and leave aside the hysterical use of “white supremacist,” a term that had hardly been used in 50 years until the left revived it a couple of years ago to describe people who are obviously no such thing. I know of nobody who favors special laws granting white people a superior legal status over members of other races. It is safe to assume that anyone using the term in 2018 has at least a mild mental illness.
I do know that no nonwhite person anywhere checks off the “white” box on a college application (because everyone knows he’d be out of his mind to do so), yet in a truly “white supremacist” society wouldn’t he be crazy not to pretend to be white?
Again, though, I have forsworn to discuss this aspect of the question.
Let’s get back to “white supremacists elected Trump.”
As Musa al-Gharbi noted on the Tom Woods Show:
(1) Trump’s most decisive victories came from districts that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012; why would these “white supremacists” have supported Obama in the first place, much less supported his re-election?
(2) Whites were actually a smaller share of the electorate in 2016 than they’d been in previous election cycles, while Hispanic and Asian representation grew. Participation rates among whites were about the same as they’d been in the previous two cycles.
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(3) When we look at those whites who went to the polls, we find that Trump won a lower share of them than even the milquetoast Mitt Romney did. Trump was actually able to win not because of whites, but because of his share of the Hispanic and Asian vote, and for getting a larger share of the black vote than Republicans had in the previous three election cycles.
But you know what? I’ll be a sport and even leave all that aside.
I’ll just boil it all down to this.
According to progressives, Trump is a “racist,” and everyone knows it — especially his supporters, who love him for it.
Yet — and here’s where the argument, such as it is, appears to stumble — his followers, who surely know how racist he is, evidently needed a woman on television to flash them a hand signal (which almost none of them would even have recognized, it should be unnecessary to add) to convey to them that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee was also a white supremacist.
Until that point, apparently, people thought Trump had nominated one of Al Sharpton’s best friends, or the head of the Rachel Maddow Fan Club, or the president of the Transgender Society of America.
Only that hand signal let them know the real truth.
I feel compelled to ask an impertinent question.
If Trump is a racist and everyone knows it, why would someone have to FLASH A HAND SIGNAL (I can hardly believe I am even writing this), of all stupid and clumsy forms of communication, to let everyone know that his Supreme Court nominee was also a racist?
As someone pointed out today on Twitter: the very same people who demanded Alex Jones’s head for indulging in “baseless conspiracy theories” are now, without a hint of self-awareness, attacking Zina Bash, a Mexican-American Jewish woman, of sending secret hand signals to imaginary Nazis.
And yet there they are, all over social media, convinced that this is what happened.
I don’t even know how to interact with such people. Today on Twitter I offered to start a GoFundMe for their mental health. Apart from that, I’m out of ideas.
It all reminds me of my favorite character in all of literature: Wonko the Sane.
Wonko the Sane, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, referred to the outside world as “Inside the Asylum,” and his home as “Outside the Asylum.”
Ol’ Wonko isn’t looking so crazy anymore, is he?
But you know what’s really Outside the Asylum?
My podcast, the Tom Woods Show.
For tens of thousands of people, it’s their daily lifeline to libertarian sanity.
Feel like you’re living in a different world from everyone else?
Then you’ll fit right in:
