Chapter review part 2: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Part one of this chapter review centered mostly on the propaganda, and the racism the modern alt-right and ex-president relies heavily on to foment false beliefs, social discord and distrust, thereby gaining significant public support. 

This 2nd review focuses on the catastrophic failure of the MSM (mainstream media) in this mess, and two matters of moral opinion, (i) the inherent dark mindset that some humans have, arguably from birth, and (ii) how much tolerance for ignorance and acceptance of propaganda lies should people of good will in a secular democracy have for a lethal threat in their midst.

The MSM

The American people are largely ignorant of what the alt-right and New Right are and stand for. Most of the American people have little or no idea of what Christian nationalism is or the history of the New Right and alt-right since the 1950s. On these issues, the MSM deserves a grade of F-, if that grade exists If not, a grade of F will have to do. IMO, that conclusion isn't a close call. It’s brain dead simple.

Posner mentions a couple of examples of ignorant, deceived MSM complicity. 

First and foremost is the Washington Times (WT). Assuming one can call it part of the MSM, a debatable proposition, that propaganda paper is solidly New Right. It tends to be deceptively described as an American conservative daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., or something bland like that. That is a bald faced lie of omission. For years, the WT employed the extreme racist Samuel Francis (1923-1994) as a syndicated columnist. As mentioned in part 1 of this chapter review, Francis is the racist hater who wrote in favor of dictatorship and justified violence by hurt delicate fascist feelings to get satisfaction, e.g., by attacking civil liberties. 

Also included in the list of incompetent MSM outlets are the Washington Post and New York Times.[1] Both of those boobs published and praised some of the later New Right propaganda and saw it as something new and worthy of consideration in American politics. Those idiots had no idea that they were praising fascist racist propaganda. They get a well-deserved F- on this issue for failing to inform the American people  of what they were in the midst of and being deceived by. To this day, most Americans are mostly or completely  unaware of what Christian nationalism is, what its leaders stand for, and how powerful and hateful it is right now.

The inherent human dark mindset

 As best I can tell, a significant proportion (sometimes majority? usually majority?) of modern humans in a culture, a nation, a group or a tribe are born with brains that develop into openness to beliefs in unpleasant ideas, including openness to and embrace of racism and the psychologically comforting lies of demagogues. This seems to be inherent in the human condition that evolution conferred. Erich Fromm focused on this in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. There, Fromm argued that many people simply cannot handle democracy and freedom due to its inherent complexity and ambiguity. They psychologically need an escape from the burdens and ambiguities of pluralistic freedom.

In my opinion, the New Right and now the alt-right reflect this ever-present aspect of the human condition. It provides a plausible at least partial rationale for why democracies and pluralism are fragile and prone to fall to tyrants and demagogues despite their typical cruelty and lies.

How tolerant should pro-truth and pro-reason patriots be?

Once upon a time, one observer was alleged to have commented on the human condition, saying something about like this: “If a person’s paycheck depends on them not understanding something, it is damn hard to get them to understand.” There is truth in that, but the observation is too narrow. A more encompassing truth is this: If a person’s paycheck, self-esteem, tribe loyalty, self-identity or ideology depends on them not understanding something, it is damn hard to get them to understand, and if they are members of a cult is it essentially impossible to get them to understand.

Most rank and file voters who vote for most modern Republicans probably do not understand what they are voting for. Their paychecks, self-esteem, cult loyalty and whatnot keep them from seeing. Their minds are trapped and blinded. They cannot see.

Questions:

Does the MSM deserve an F for its failure to adequately report on the New Right and now alt-right, or are the American people reasonably well-informed? Does economic fear keep the MSM from dealing with this competently? If not that, then what?

How much tolerance for that should there be from people who mostly see and accept the alt-right propaganda? Does it matter that those people are often or usually quite intolerant of others they disagree with? Does it matter that they often (usually?) reject differing opinions out of hand, no matter how respectfully they are presented?

Footnote: 

1. In 1986, the Washington Post published an essay by the hard core racist Paul Weyrich that argued for a moderate new trend he called cultural conservatism. He called that “the most important political idea” of the times. It was pure propaganda. Weyrich was astute and understood it would take time to bamboozle the press. He commented that reporters would need to be “spoon fed these ideas over and over again” before New Right propaganda started to gain traction. The bamboozled boobs at the New York Times gushed in a 1987 opinion piece that Weyrich’s drivel might be, as Posner described it, “ushering in a new era of conservative compassion and service to others.” What a load of rot from buffaloed fools.

A little Sunday science pleasure/torture for the right/wrong person

Taking a much-needed mental break from politics, what do you think about “reality?”  Nebulous question, I grant you. 😁 But more specifically, I’m wondering, is math just one property of reality?  Or is math one and the same with what we think of as reality? Yes, a question right down my alley, and one that is being hotly debated in the science world.

From the World Science Festival (begin viewing at the 1:14:18 mark):

 

 

 

So, is a cucumber, with all its mathematical properties, potentially a Ferrari given a different math structure/configuration?  Is a tree just numbers? 

Task: Argue your POV: That reality IS only math *or* That reality IS NOT only math.

If you see reality as NOT only math (but more), name something, anything, whose properties (at its most fundamental) cannot be described in mathematical terms ...*and*... what precludes that something, making it stand above/outside of math.  IOW, justify your answer.  Any takers here?

(While I'm hoping for it, I'm not expecting much of a turnout here. 😉  That's fine. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing.  No problem.)

Chapter review: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. This chapter summarizes the recent, frightening history of the intense racism, racist propaganda and revisionist history that is a major driver of the modern New Right political movement, now sometimes called the alt-right. The movement is firmly grounded in lies and sophisticated emotional manipulation that is arguably second to none in human history. In large part, this chapter is about the stunning power of dark free speech and its ability to create faux realities in people’s minds based on lies, emotional appeals to base instincts (especially racism) and crackpot conspiracies.

At the end of the chapter, Posner briefly touches on the influence of the ex-president. She argues that he and his rhetoric saved the alt-right from a slow march into oblivion. He did that by normalizing white nationalism and making its alleged but false grievances appear to be real and, importantly, applicable to tens of millions of average Americans:

“From Bob Whitaker to Sam Francis to William Lind to Donald Trump, the mythic ‘middle American radical’ was honed not only as a political mascot, but as a locus for voter resentment, a rallying cry for cultivating voters who believed that liberalism, pluralism  and civil rights had ripped their heritage and culture right out from under them. The history of the New Right--and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation and other efforts at ending race discrimination--has been largely forgotten or erased. .... Over the years, the [pro-Trump] coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans. 

But once Trump brought white nationalism out of the closet, the opposition to civil rights and multiculturalism as elitist ideas tyrannically imposed on white Americans were familiar not only to the hard core white supremacists of the alt-right but to conservatives and paleoconservatives steeped in the same grievances. These voters still harbored resentments that their rights and standing in American society had been somehow diminished by the civil rights movement--and that the ‘mainstream’ conservatism of the two Bush presidencies had not represented their interests, either. Trump didn’t make an entirely new movement out of whole cloth. With his own televangelist gloss, he reactivated the fundamental driving force of the conservative movement of the second half of the twentieth century.”

The propaganda on this point is superb. Before Trump, the alt-right movement had already learned to shift its rhetoric from overt racism to grievance about lost white status and privilege at the hands of hostile outsiders and foreigners. Based on the history, the core New Right grievance was and still is racist. Probably no more than about 2-3% of people who supported the ex-president are aware of most of the real history, instead relying on the deceit, lies and revisionism that the New Right movement routinely relied on in its messaging. Nearly all of those people sincerely believe that they are not racist and that the people they support are not racist. The con job here is breathtaking.

The elites of this movement, reasonably called Christian nationalism, are all aware of what they are doing and why. They are intractably racist but they know how to make it appear that they are not. They work quietly and persistently. In the federal government, they constitute a group of people who can accurately be called the deep state.

Although racism is the focus of this chapter, the Christian nationalist movement is fundamentally a decentralized political movement. The core agenda is accumulation of wealth and power for white elite Christians and elimination of secular government, public education and civil liberties. The vehicle used to gain public support is ruthless dark free speech designed to polarize, divide and foment distrust in society. The tactics are always the same, i.e., heavy reliance on lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and partisan motivated reasoning. Playing on racism is a core element in the New Right propaganda toolbox.

Some of the racist history 

For the most part, the modern timeline goes back to the 1950s and Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered public school desegregation. Those decisions, later lower court rulings and government implementation of means to desegregate schools and reduce discrimination fueled the New Right movement starting from the 1950s, and it still does in 2021. In particular, school busing and attempts to make school textbooks less white Christian centric and revisionist were powerful drivers of support for the New Right. Fights over public school textbooks are still important to the alt-right. A core idea of the Brown decision is that separate but equal is unconstitutional. The New Right elites reject that reasoning. The rank and file may mostly support it, but the people in power do not.

The New Right led the attacks on all federal efforts to desegregate public schools. Federal actions were portrayed as subverting parental authority, anti-American, anti-Christian and, as Posner puts it, “subversive to the natural order of things.” At least since the 1970s, the New Right quietly exerted significant power through its presence in the federal government: 

“.... people associated with the alt-right [earlier the New Right] have always been a seamless part of official Washington .... Often their presence, and their impact on policy, has gone unnoticed. .... they represented a potent and enduring strand of the American right, one that seethed with resentment over its exile from mainstream conservatism--making it primed to be activated when Trump came on the scene. .... [Despite occasional purges by conservative Republicans] they, and their odious ideas, never went away.”

One federal employee, Robert Whitaker, played a modest role in the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. After the 1980s he was publicly quiet until 2006 when he resurfaced as a white supremacist, writing for the neo-Nazi website National Vanguard that immigration was a horror and white people were the victims: “But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of  genocide against my race, the white race, .... Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.” In 2015, Whitaker ran for president for the white supremacist American Freedom Party, but he dropped off the ticket after the AFP endorsed the ex-president in 2016. 

A key New Right propaganda goal was to foment distrust in the federal government and public schools. One New Right propagandist, James McKenna, a lawyer working  at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 1975: “Parents are worried that the schools are turning into big impersonal bureaucracies that do not respond to pressure from the grassroots. People no longer automatically trust the government to know what’s best.”

In congressional testimony in 1974, another New Right propagandist, M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union, attacked school busing and the core reasoning in the 1954 Brown decision. Evans argued that for school segregation, separate was equal and black children were better off in segregated schools. The Brown holding was that separate was not equal. Evans’ reasoning was cynical and ice-cold. He argued that the liberal education establishment “became convinced and apparently convinced some of our federal judges that Negro children must be taken out of their homes and neighborhoods and placed in an ‘artificial environment’ created by the government, where they will be immersed as fully as possible in an altogether different culture.” Evans complained that liberals believed they had “a commission to tinker around with psychic makeup of the human species.” This line of reasoning, fake concern for black children, was a brilliant bit of propaganda that conflicted with the reasoning in Brown.

A related line of propaganda in New Right opposition to public school desegregation was that it was needed to protect white students. Protect them from what? To protect them from the trauma of personally experiencing the truths in all the white racist myths and lies about black people, including their affinity for crime, their lower IQ and their inherent immoral personal character. New Right propagandist Robert Whitaker wrote: “The proposition that busing promotes brotherhood would be hilarious if it were not so cruel. .... In many  schools children raised in the ghetto are a terror. Hence, for impressionable young white minds, the black beast of the most virulent racist literature seems observed reality.” Now that is real racism. 

The New Right is open to getting its way by violence and dictatorship. An influential New Right propagandist, Sam Francis (1923-1994), wrote about white grievance being rooted “in perceived injustices, unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and an insulted past. [It is] therefore understandable that some of its adherents sometimes fantasize that the cartridge box is a not unsatisfactory substitute for the ballot box.” Posner describes Francis as the patron saint of the modern alt-right. On dictatorship, or an imperial presidency Francis wrote : “the adoption of Caesarist tactics [would] reflect the historical pattern by which rising classes ally with an executive power to displace the oligarchy that is entrenched in the intermediate bodies. .... only the Presidency has the power and the resources to begin the process and mobilize popular support for it.” 

No wonder Posner calls Francis the patron saint of the modern alt-right. These people are not just racist. They are also fascist and anti-democratic. Just like Francis was. He clearly foresaw the possibility of a monster like Trump rising to power to save the white race from the alleged oppression of religion, civil liberties and a pluralist society. Posner comments on the Francis legacy: “Francis’s books are regularly read and celebrated by the alt-right and paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan.”

Questions: 

1. It is reasonable to believe that most rank and file Republicans are not themselves racist, but nonetheless support an arguably racist movement that they sincerely believe is fighting against oppression of the white race and/or to preserve or advance white social status, e.g., by attacking civil liberties? 

2. It is reasonable to believe that the New Right and now the alt-right has deceived most Christian evangelicals into strong support for a fascist, racist agenda, regardless of how they view the movement?

Racists sabotaged the Afghan federal Special Immigrant Visa program

In an interview with a former staff person, Olivia Troye, working for Mike Pence when he was Vice President said that the racist Steven Miller sabotaged the Afghanistan visa process. Miller and his racist thugs stopped it as long as the racist ex-president was still in office. That is why Afghan allies visa applications were not processed, granted and flown to safety as long as the racists were in power. Troye said that people within the federal government came to her begging to see if Pence, also a racist whether he knows it or not, would help them process desperately needed visa approvals. Federal employees who tried to process visas were threatened with loss of their jobs and pensions. They were frozen in fear and did nothing.  

Instead of being honest and transparent by cancelling the visa program, our racist ex-president and the racist thugs and liars who worked for him sabotaged a federal program in the name of their racism and hostility to non-White immigrants.

Some Steven Miller quotes and context

"Continue to worship at the altar of multiculturalism and we may come to see that we are participating in the sacrifice of the one culture which binds us all."

"No just society can survive which abandons God."

"Every American has the right to support a policy of retreat and capitulation, and, as so many leftists do, they also have right to lie and slander the country and the president to further this agenda."

"The Hollywood crowd feels sympathy for the terrorists, detests Republicans and sees America as an obstacle to a better world."

From NPR, Nov. 26, 2019: 

For almost three decades, Jared Taylor has been publishing his ideas about race at the American Renaissance magazine and now at a website called AmRen, which is considered a mouthpiece for white supremacist ideology.

"The races are not identical and equivalent," says Taylor, who calls himself a "race realist" and rejects the white supremacist label. "There are patterns of difference. But this is now something that's considered a huge, hateful taboo in the United States."

The website is not well-known outside white nationalist circles — but it found an audience in White House adviser Stephen Miller.

Miller has recommended articles on AmRen and another white nationalist site called VDARE. We know this because the Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered hundreds of emails that Miller wrote to a reporter at Breitbart News before he worked in the White House.  

Civil rights activists and more than 100 members of Congress — all Democrats — have called for Miller's resignation since the publication of the emails. But the White House is standing behind him. And Republicans have been largely silent. Critics say that this suggests the line of what's acceptable in public discourse has shifted.

By 2019, it should have been obvious to everyone that the line of what's acceptable in public discourse had shifted. The fascist, Christian nationalist Republican Party and its fascist leader shifted it. Acceptance of White Supremacism and overt discrimination against non-White had become acceptable and mainstream in the fascist Republican Party.

One can only wonder whether such deep state sabotage operations like what the ex-president, Miller and other racist thugs pulled off is or should be legal.

Questions: When Biden asserted that chaos was baked into the final exit process, was he mostly right in view of the fact that the racist former administration sabotaged any chance of an orderly exist for US allies?

Is Troye lying and the visa program was working as intended, not sabotaged?

By sabotaging the visa program, were racists in the federal government, including the ex-president, who sabotaged the visa program acting in good faith as responsible leaders, or were they conducting an immoral deep state operation to hide the truth of their animosity to non-White immigrants, even ones who risked their lives in service to the US military mission in Afghanistan? 

Is it fair or accurate to call the ex-president and people like Steven Miller racist or liars? 

Is it fair or accurate to see Steven Miller as a radical Christian nationalist bigot working quietly to advance the bigoted Christian nationalist agenda of power and wealth transfer to elite White Christians, advancing White supremacy, and advancing fundamentalist Christianity and Christian rule based on a Biblical worldview and Biblical law, i.e., Christian Sharia law?