“Mood music” for white-nationalist terror
by Tom Sullivan
Shooting Saturday at synagogue north of San Diego left one dead, three injured.
When after the 2017 Charlottesville attacks by white nationalists who chanted “Jews will not replace us,” the sitting president knew to keep them in his camp by claiming there were “very fine people on both sides.” Responding to Joe Biden’s presidential launch addressing that the incident, Donald Trump has not backed away from his statement. He now claims “very fine people” referred to those opposed to the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Within 24 hours, a gunman entered a synagogue Saturday in Poway, California and opened fire, killing one person and injuring three others. In response, Trump denounced anti-Semitism at the beginning of his Green Bay, Wisconsin rally Saturday night.
Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., white nationalists with a bullhorn disrupted a bookstore talk by Jonathan Metzl, author of “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland.” They chanted, “This land is our land” as well as “AIM,” a reference to the American Identity Movement, a rebranding of the white supremacist Identity Evropa.
So this bullshit just went down today at Politics & Prose. White nationalists disrupting @JonathanMetzl talk on his book Dying of Whiteness. Point made. @PM_Learn pic.twitter.com/nucKlrJ8X2— Catherine Wigginton (@cewigginton) April 27, 2019
The Washington Post reports:
According to the most recent annual report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has long tracked extremist activity, 39 of the 50 extremist-related murders tallied by the group in 2018 were committed by white supremacists, up from 2017, when white supremacists were responsible for 18 of 34 such crimes.
Trump has previously played down the threat posed by white nationalism. After a gunman last month killed 49 Muslims in two consecutive mosque attacks in New Zealand, Trump was asked by a reporter whether he thought white nationalists were a growing threat around the world. “I don’t, really,” Trump replied. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
“All white supremacy, all neo-Nazis, all anti-Christianity, all anti-Semitism, all anti-Muslim activity should be condemned,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Mehdi Hasan, columnist for The Intercept and Al Jazeera English presenter, told MSNBC’s AM Joy there is a global
“epidemic of white nationalist terror” and a national security threat the U.S. president does not take seriously [timestamp 6:50]:
“This month alone … in the United States, in real life, a guy burned down three black churches in Louisiana. Another guy tried to run over an interracial couple in New Orleans. Another guy was sentenced to prison in Oregon for running over and murdering a young black man. In California, a man drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians because he thought they were Muslim — put a teenage girl in a coma. And yesterday we saw this man, this alleged killer, 19-year-old, walking into a synagogue and opening fire, killing one person, injuring three.”
Not only will Trump not acknowledge the threat, and in fact minimizes it, says Hasan, “He’s providing the mood music for it.”
“We forcefully condemn the evil of anti-Semitism and hate,” Trump told the Green Bay crowd saying he would “get to the bottom of it.” He added with reflexive conspiratorial flourish, “We’re going to get to the bottom of a lot of things happening in this country.”
But perhaps he should not have led with condemning Mexicans as rapists and criminals, attempting to ban Muslim visitors, and giving a wink and a nod to white nationalists. Infrequent, generic renunciation of hate crimes only under duress is unconvincing, perhaps deliberately so.
Refusing to walk back describing neo-Nazis as “very fine people” is simply Trumpish alpha dog behavior. Never exhibit weakness. Keep the rest subservient or one of the other dogs might think you ripe for deposing. As much credit as the right gets for strategy, it is often no more sophisticated than that. It is a feral instinct for survival. Weaker members of the pack seek out the alpha’s favor for protection. Without them, he is in charge of nothing.
The sitting president may not be the business genius he claims, or the consummate deal-maker — he is clearly not as bright as he boasts — but he understands dominance.