"BAD PEOPLE MAKING TROUBLE" — John Derbyshire On MSM (And GOP) Charlottesville Hysteria

By John Derbyshire

08/19/2017

My first take on the news comes right after I get out of bed in the morning, when I've retrieved my paper copy of the New York Post from the driveway to read over my breakfast oatmeal. The NYP’s not bad, as MainStream Media goes. But last Sunday’s issue was straight-up CultMarx Narrative. "TERROR IN VIRGINIA," screamed the front-page headline, "Car plows into protest, killing one." "CAR-TERROR MOW-DOWN AT VA. PROTEST," said the main headline to the story on Page 6.

At this point it wasn’t actually known whether the car driver, James Alex Fields, was acting with terrorist intent, or just panicked, thinking he was the lone guy in the lone car in a street full of brick-throwing antiFas and club-wielding Black Lives Matter ghetto hoodlums.

In fact, it’s still not known. As our own James Kirkpatrick has pointed out, when the car incident is studied to courtroom standards of evidence, Fields may turn out to be another George Zimmerman, doing the only thing he could think of doing to save his life. Don’t be surprised if there’s another Narrative Collapse.

Thirty-five years ago, when I was living in Communist China, I saw a headline in Reference News, a newspaper for Party cadres that had some actual news in it, as opposed to the newspapers for the masses, which were all propaganda.

This headline was on a story about an unauthorized demonstration by coal miners in the next-door province against their appalling work conditions. It was unusual to see a story about any kind of civil unrest, which is why this one caught my eye. It was the headline that stuck in my mind, though. Translation: "BAD PEOPLE MAKING TROUBLE."

Our own news outlets haven’t sunk to quite that level yet, but they're getting there. "HATRED ON THE MARCH," said the headline on Sunday’s New York Post. Subhead: "White supremacists spew their bigotry and turn violent."

Note the compulsory "sp — " word. I've been remarking on this for at least, looking in my archives, fifteen years. Can some neurolinguist — Professor McWhorter, perhaps — explain why an "sp — " word is compulsory when reporting dissident speech?

Similarly, the word "hate" and its derivatives are being corralled off so that in a decade or two they will only be applied to dissidents from state dogma — just as a whole generation has grown up thinking that the word "pride" refers to something only homosexuals have. (Steve Sailer has quipped that if you tell an American teenager nowadays about the 1942 movie Pride of the Yankees he'll assume it’s the story of Lou Gehrig coming out of the closet.)

You want hate? I got hate. Here’s a tweet from Wes Bellamy. No, I beg his pardon, I should have said "Wes Bellamy, M.Ed." The guy holds a Master’s degree in Education. Here’s his tweet.

I don’t like whit[e] people so I hate white snow!

Mr. Bellamy … should that be Master Bellamy, to respect his academic achievements? … the Bellamy person is black, you see. Here’s another one of his tweets.

I hate seeing White people in Orangeburg.

Here’s another one.

White women = Devil RT.

"RT" is Twitter slang for "real talk."

Why am I telling you about this guy? Because he’s Deputy Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Did I mention that he has a Master’s degree in Education? And he’s totally free of hate — yes, Sir! No hate here!

If you want hate, you need to head off to the Dissident Right. Your guide here should be the Southern Poverty Law Center, who will direct you to the merchants of hate.

To me, for example. Actual quote from the SPLC’s dossier on me, referring to my 2012 article "The Talk: Nonblack Version," quote:

[Derbyshire’s] article, presented as conversation between a white parent and their child included lines like, [inner quote] "A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us."

How hateful of me was it to write — I’m sorry, I mean of course "spew" — to spew that? Who but a hate-filled bigot could believe such a hatefully hateful thing?

Perhaps I should have taken a Master’s in Education to purge my mind of hate.

And how the MSM love that phrase "white supremacy"! I earned everlasting infamy two years ago by writing — or "spewing," "spouting," whatever — that white supremacy is terrifically popular with black Africans and brown Middle Easterners, to judge by the numbers of those folk willing to spend their families' savings and risk their own lives to escape from nonwhite supremacy across the Mediterranean to Europe, where whites are supreme.

On what economists call "revealed preference," the whole world — most especially black Africa — loves white supremacy.

Yet in the pages of our newspapers, and on the lips of our TV presenters, white supremacy is evil. Hard to figure.

I doubt in any case that even on the CultMarx meaning of the phrase "white supremacy" — which is, wanting to boss nonwhite people around, beat them up at will and lynch them when they get uppity — even on that meaning, I doubt there were many white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally. Probably there were some; but it was a rich pudding.

Richard Spencer was there, for example, and he’s a white separatist, not at all a white supremacist. He doesn’t want to boss nonwhites around, he just wants the freedom to live apart from them.

You can agree or disagree with that, but I can’t see that it’s malign. Nor is it "hateful."

You can believe that it’s impossible for whites and nonwhites to live harmoniously together, without hating anyone. Practically all 19th-century white Americans did so believe, including Abraham Lincoln and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Another big element among the original Charlottesville rally: the Three Percenters, concerning whom even the CultMarx website Buzzfeed allows, quote:

The group’s views align more with libertarianism — fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution and an emphasis on personal liberty — than with the alt-right.

And remember the original point of the rally: to protest the removal of a statue that had stood in the park for decades. A demonstration of that kind will draw some crazy people, to be sure; but it will also draw a lot of ordinary decent citizens who just don’t like the way things are going.

Thus the demonstrator quoted by The New York Times: "I’m tired of seeing white people pushed around." A great many Americans feel the same way. A few of them are white supremacists, in the CultMarx sense; the overwhelming majority are not. [Hurt and Angry, Charlottesville Tries to Regroup From Violence by Sheryl Gay Stolberg; New York Times, August 13th 2017.]

Were there neo-Nazis and KKK types at the rally? I wouldn’t be surprised, although I’m not going to believe anything the MSM tell me on this point. As Ann Coulter asked rhetorically in her column the other day:

Was the rally one percent Nazi or 99 percent? We can’t know because the rally was shut down before anyone could make speeches.

And of course nobody, certainly not my New York Post, was calling out the opposition fringe elements for what they were: anarchist, communist, anti-white, anti-American.

Well, almost nobody. A singular exception was … the President of the United States. Trump’s first comments came on Saturday:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

That vexed some GOP congresscritters, who complained that the President should have restricted his criticism to one side — and of course you know which one.

The President — you can hear his eyes rolling at this point — knew he had to pour oil on the congressional waters, given how much his party hates him, so on Monday he put out an official statement from the White House:

Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

Needless to say, that didn’t satisfy the MSM, who didn’t believe him (nor did VDARE.com’s Peter Brimelow). On Tuesday the President proved them right. Sample quotes:

The driver of the car is a murderer. What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.

[That of course refers to James Fields].

What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? …Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do …

You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I'll say it right now … You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent …

Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee … you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.

Full Transcript and Video: Trump’s News Conference in New York, New York Times, August 15, 2017

The President’s remarks at this presser were delivered with his usual verbal clumsiness. But they were factual and fair — except about James Fields being a murderer, which remains to be proved. However, they were not narrative-compliant.

The core credo of our MSM and elites is the slogan popularized by an old French radical: Pas d'ennemis à gauche! — "No enemies to the Left!" That’s why it was considered very bad taste to mention Barack Obama’s long and fruitful friendships with communist terrorist Bill Ayres and anti-white radical Jeremiah Wright. That’s why no Establishment figure holds it against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that he chose Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship for his honeymoon.

For violating this article of Establishment faith, President Trump spent the rest of the week having bitter insults hurled at him from every point of the political compass. That included, of course, the whole menagerie of GOP cucks. Marco Rubio tweeted that, tweet:

The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win.We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected 6/6

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 15, 2017

The Senator enumerated those reasons in a 6-tweet thread ( I only see five) but I don’t think there is any better argument in the missing one — here are 2, 3, and 4:

• They are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin. 2/6
• When entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them 3/6
• These groups today use SAME symbols & same arguments of #Nazi & #KKK, groups responsible for some of worst crimes against humanity ever 4/6

Marco is justifying violence in response to symbols and ideas.

But we haven’t sampled the full menu of cuckery until Mitt Romney’s been heard from. Yep, here he comes. Tweet:

No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.

So: The senior statemen of our Republican Party have now endorsed "anarchists, communists, socialists across the political spectrum," to quote an Antifa representative, as well as the anti-white, anti-cop radicals of Black Lives Matter. Those people are, says Mittens, in a morally different universe from the guy who said he was tired of seeing white people pushed around.

If you favor the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the liquidation of the Kulak class, and the abolition of private property; or if, like the Black Lives Matter crowd, you think the only good cop is a dead cop; or if, like the Deputy Mayor of Charlottesville, you just don’t like white people; if you belong to any of those categories, you are morally superior to a person who thinks statues of Civil War generals ought to be left alone, according to the Republican Party’s 2012 Presidential candidate.

Good to know.

A Romney story: in election years, GOP hopefuls would stop by at National Review for a chat. I was always the only person in the room ever to ask about immigration policy.

Romney did one of those stop-bys sometime in the year or so before the 2012 election. Sure enough, after a round of questions from other editors, I asked Romney the only question about immigration.

Now, I won’t say Romney went totally deer-in-the-headlights; but there was a longer-than-should-have-been pause. It was plain that Romney had never in his life given five seconds connected thought to the topic of immigration — the topic, more than any other, that shapes the country your grandchildren, and mine, and Mitt Romney’s, will live in.

He mumbled something at last about how that was definitely something he'd be looking into, and the talk moved on to other things — to the immense relief of the other National Review editors, who were no more keen to discuss immigration than Mittens was.

Why would anyone want to bring up a topic like that? Someone might call you racist!

At week’s end here, the hysteria has abated somewhat; and the atrocity in Barcelona has distracted the MSM.

It'll be a long time, though, before our ruling classes forgive the President for so brazenly violating that central article of their ideological faith. No enemies on the Left!

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com:FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.