In late 2016, Scott Alexander–the man behind the blog “Slate Star Codex”–wrote a fantastic article ripping the media for stoking the ridiculous and massively irresponsible idea that Donald Trump is a “white supremacist”. The article was entitled “You Are Still Crying Wolf”:
Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and how he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an “openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe”, because we already wasted all those terms this year.
What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that he doesn’t go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?
We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”
The article is very long and contains tons of data but Alexander’s main point is that it’s a complete media fabrication this idea that Trump is some sort of White Supremacist. He points out that in 2016, Trump did better with minority voters than Romney did in 2012. He points out that Trump went out of his way to appeal to minorities, at one point saying during a campaign rally in Texas:
“We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” the Republican nominee jabbed, after criticizing his rival on the controversial Clinton Foundation.
Trump went out of his way to say that. Why would he say that if he was a WHITE SUPREMACIST?
Alexander’s article is very long and, in my view, quite exhaustive. He settles the matter once and for all: Trump is not a white supremacist. It’s deeply irresponsible that, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Democratic Party and its media arm made it priority #1 in 2016 to cast Donald Trump as the biggest racist in America.
Alexander begged and pleaded with people–mainly the media–to just stop lying and being so hyperbolic about Trump. But of course as we see today, his efforts were futile.
Today’s media reaction to one specific moment from Tuesday night’s debate–“Mr. President, will you condemn white supremacism?”–shows that the media is still grossly irresponsible and more determined than ever to convince the country that Trump is a full-blown white supremacist.
Joe Biden’s Twitter account tweeted this yesterday:
Biden claimed Trump refused to condemn white supremacism, as if Trump was asked to do so and said “No.” Not only that but in Biden’s montage of supposed white supremacist groups doing Scary White Supremacist Things, he had an image of Kyle Rittenhouse from Kenosha, who was most certainly not a “white supremacist.” The media immediately began saying he was after the incident where he shot the two Antifa thugs in self-defense, but there was and remains no evidence at all that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. Apparently being a white person with a gun is enough for the Democratic Nominee for President to consider you a white supremacist.
More than 24 hours later, this was still trending on Twitter:
As was this:
Look at how this tweet is worded–it’s the same phrasing as Biden used:
“Hollywood slams Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists”
At what point did Trump refuse to condemn white supremacists? Have a look at the transcripts. There is no refusal:
Do you see a refusal here? Does Trump say, “No, I refuse,” or “No, I won’t condemn it”?
Of course not.
He was asked if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and he said, “Sure.” Maybe not the most emphatic affirmation, but an affirmation of Wallace’s question nonetheless. It also didn’t help that Wallace started talking over him almost immediately. As Wallace was prattling on, Trump said “sure” again, and if you watch the clip you can tell from the expression on his face, and his body language, the way he said “sure” was like a “Yeah, of course, obviously. This is ridiculous that you’re even asking.”
Yes, Trump could have easily said, “I condemn white supremacism.”
But also, in his mind, he’s probably thinking, “I’ve done it a dozen times already and they don’t care.” On top of that, he’s probably thinking that since he’s not a white supremacist, nor has he ever avowed white supremacists, why should he have to continually disavow them just because the media demands it?
I, too, would be hesitant to disavow white supremacism if I had never once avowed it. Because if you give in to the media’s demands, then it kinda makes you look like you did at one point avow it, and that it is a serious problem in this country rather than a completely baseless media narrative.
Trump has been a public figure for 30+ years now and not once was he ever called a racist until he ran for President. Before 2015, nobody in this country heard the name Donald Trump and immediately thought of white supremacist terrorism. It’s probably a big mindfuck for him to suddenly be considered The Leader of the White Supremacists, and rightly so. Because he’s not and he’s never been.
And it is ridiculous that Chris Wallace demanded Trump condemn white supremacism given that Trump has done so repeatedly over the past five years–ever since he started running for President.
From February of this year via FactCheck.org:
Let’s revisit Trump’s comments in the days after the Charlottesville rally. That rally turned violent, and one person, Heather Heyer, was killed and many others injured, when a man with a history of making racist comments plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters.
The day of that incident Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.” Trump said he had spoken to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and “we agreed that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true affection — really — and I say this so strongly — true affection for each other.”
Two days later, on Aug. 14, 2017, Trump issued a statement from the White House, and referred to “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
You can go to the link for the full quote on Charlottesville, but Trump most certainly did not call the neo-Nazis “very fine people.” He was referring to a group of people who were not neo-Nazis who were also present to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
Here is a video showing Trump disavowing white supremacists over 20 times dating all the way back to 2000:
20 times! They just kept asking him the same question over and over again. If I were in his shoes, I’d be more than a little tired of getting asked this question.
In his Inaugural Address, he went out of his way to condemn prejudice of all kinds:
At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.
When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.
The Bible tells us, “how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.”
But that’s no good in the media’s eyes: only one form of prejudice must be condemned, and that’s white supremacism. Other forms of it are to be encouraged, in their view. They get really pissed when Trump says he condemns hatred of all kinds and doesn’t just single out white supremacism, as if it’s the only kind of hatred that’s bad.
Just 5 days ago, Trump signed an order designating both Antifa and the KKK as terrorist organizations. On top of that he announced that $500 billion in capital will now be made available to black communities. Do you think he gave the black community $500 billion dollars in order to trick people into thinking he’s not a racist?
And to save the best clip for last, here’s Trump condemning white supremacists during a debate in 2016…. a debate that none other than Chris Wallace himself was moderating:
This makes Wallace look even more dishonest given that he asked Trump the same question four years prior.
Not only has Trump condemned white supremacism on dozens of occasions over the past 5 years thereby rendering Wallace’s question unnecessary, but Wallace was wrong to even make white supremacism a point of discussion in the debate given that the vast majority of the violence and rioting happening in the country right now is coming from the far left. And Chris Wallace had zero interest in talking about Antifa/BLM.
Joe Biden not only didn’t condemn Antifa, he denied Antifa even existed. He said, “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.”
But Joe insisted that Trump condemn the Proud Boys.
Who have the Proud Boys killed? What cities have the Proud Boys burned down? How many stores have the Proud Boys looted? How many times have the Proud Boys shut down entire cities with their rioting?
For goodness’ sakes the leader of the Proud Boys isn’t even white: his name is Enrique Tarrio and according to Gateway Pundit he’s black and Hispanic. How could a “white supremacist group” choose a non-white as its leader? It makes no logical sense.
But it’s possible now that we live in a country where the media unironically runs headlines like this:
“Why young men of color are joining white supremacist groups”
Shouldn’t that be a dead giveaway that perhaps they’re not white supremacist groups?
The media begins from the assumption that everything they don’t approve of is WHITE SUPREMACISM, and when they run into evidence that directly contradicts their initial assumptions, that square peg of evidence must nevertheless be forced into the round hole of their initial assumptions.
So the supposed white supremacist groups are evidently not white supremacist groups, but do you think the media is going to let that stop them from stoking a nationwide panic over the specter of WHITE SUPREMACISM while simultaneously sweeping the shocking levels of actual, occurring and not theoretical radical leftwing violence and lawlessness under the rug? Of course not.
You know the media by now: they never let the truth stand in their way.
The media always comes out with these “reports” supposedly “proving” that WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISM is the biggest threat this nation faces, and that WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISTS are running around everywhere killing minorities left and right. According to Newsweek, between 2015-2019 there were 64 Americans killed by white supremacist terrorism. (And as Newsweek gleefully notes, That’s means they’ve killed more people* than radical Islamic Terrorists, you know! *Data set begins on September 12, 2001).
While 64 is obviously 64 too many, this is not some Urgent, Pressing National Crisis that demands round-the-clock media coverage and must be the focal point of the Presidential election. We live in a highly diverse nation with people of all races, ethnicities and religions. There are violent extremists in virtually every subset of the population. They’re always going to be around in some capacity.
And contrary to what the media says, relations between the various racial, ethnic and religious groups have never been better. Well, until about six years ago, that is. The media has since Ferguson been doing its damndest to change that, and a large part of it is its over-emphasis on sporadic, one-off incidents that, while vile and tragic and completely unacceptable, are not things that we should be obsessing over. Bad things happen all the time. Bad people people have and will always exist. But treating them as if they just now started happening and are far more prevalent than they actually are is simply despicable. We do not need to completely dismantle America because of sporadic instances of white supremacist violence.
This may come as a shock but when the media continually depicts the country as if it’s in the ramp-up to a full-blown racial battle royale, more and more people are going to believe it and act accordingly.
White supremacists are not running amok. The KKK’s national membership is, according to Wikipedia, between 5,000-8,000. That’s 0.000024% of the country. Scott Alexander in the post at the top estimated the size of the alt-right to be about 50,000 nationwide:
The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.
Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.
4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.
Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.
50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)
So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.
It’s ridiculous to believe that A. the nation is teeming with white supremacists, and B. Trump caters to them and desperately craves their support.
Besides, in any given year, far more white people are killed by black people than vice versa. This is the data from 2018:
514 white people killed by black people, 234 black people killed by white people. 2.2x as many black-on-white homicides despite the fact that there are 4.5x more white people in the country than black people. This comes out to:
- 1 in 833k odds a white person kills a black person
- 1 in 84k odds a black person kills a white person.
So black on white homicide is 9.9x more prevalent than white on black homicide.
Does the media want to talk about why there’s such a shocking disparity there? No?
Could it possibly have anything to do with anti-white racism, which is largely stoked by the media?
The point here is to show just how completely untethered to reality the media has become. They have built up an alternate reality where white supremacism is more or less the single greatest crisis in America right now, and tens of millions of people are fully immersed in that alternate reality.
Why do so many people believe the media’s lies? The easy answer is that people simply believe what they see on the news and on social media without checking to see if it’s true. While most Americans by this point claim to distrust the media, they don’t behave like it: they still believe that any and everything important that happens in this country will be on the news. If it’s on the news, that must mean it’s important, and if it’s important then it’s on the news. And vice versa. If it’s not on the news, it’s as if it never happened, ie. the old “tree falling in the forest with nobody around” maxim.
The media’s priorities have become millions of Americans’ priorities. So when the media obsesses over white supremacism, tens of millions of Americans do as well.
But it goes even beyond that: the media frames things in a way that appeals to people’s sense of morality within the confines of a secular country that still nevertheless strongly desires a strict moral code and foundation in order to determine Good from Bad. And that moral code is Antiracism.
The only people who were outraged at Trump’s supposed “refusal” to condemn white supremacism are the people who are simply determined to believe he’s a hardcore racist no matter what.
These people have access to the internet. There’s no excuse to be this misinformed. I know the Democrats lie a lot, I know the media lies a lot, I know celebrities lie about Trump all the time. But these are not excuses for grown adults to be so badly misinformed and, as a result, vein-popping mad because of it.
Being really really angry and OUTRAGED does not mean you’re right. If a complete stranger came up to you and said, “Hey, that guy down the street made a pass at your wife,” would you immediately go grab your gun and confront your neighbor in a rage? No–at least I hope not. You’d find out whether what the stranger told you was true first.
And if it turns out it wasn’t true, wouldn’t you be mad at the stranger for lying to you and getting you all mad?
Instead of getting mad at the media for lying to them, many people in this country choose to retreat even deeper into the media’s alternate reality.
They believe Trump is a racist because they want to believe it.
They want to be outraged over Trump’s racism because it makes them feel like good people. They need this. They need to have that constant reassurance that they’re morally superior to Trump and all his supporters. The Religion of Wokeness needs its equivalent to infidels, heretics, etc. It needs an “other” to hate and, more importantly, look down upon.
For so many of these people, Not Being Racist has become the crowning achievement of their lives. It’s what reassures them that they are Good People.
Now this is of course not to say that there’s anything wrong with Not Being Racist, but it is to say that in post-Civil Rights Era America–from ~1965 to 2014–most Americans viewed the matter differently: you were not special for simply Not Being A Racist. It was just expected of you.
Nowadays, though, people think they’re special for Not Being Racist. They go out of their way to show everyone how Not Racist they are. And if you don’t do the same–if you’re not constantly virtue signaling on social media about how Not Racist you are–well then that must mean you’re a racist. Not being racist is no longer enough.
In fact, this has basically become the official slogan of the self-proclaimed “Antiracists”: it’s not enough to simply not be racist.
Tons of headlines say as much:
This should tell you something about the true state of this country: Once the Democratic Party realized that this country wasn’t racist anymore, they had to come up with a new narrative through which to keep the activists marching through the streets, the donations pouring in, and the electorate divided along racial lines: not only is the country still racist, it’s Systemically Racist, and things are worse than ever for minorities.
The 2012 election was the last time the Democratic Party marched under its traditional banner of economic populism: tax the rich, support labor unions, latent socialism, etc.
Ever since Ferguson, the Democratic Party has been primarily about race and identity politics. Yes, the party is more socialist than ever before, but they don’t really talk about economics these days. Outside of RUSSIA, what has been the Democrats’ one main, overarching attack on Trump since 2015: he’s a White Supremacist.
Trump basically stole the mantle of economic populism right from under them. But he did it rightwing-style: populism mixed with patriotic nationalism, minus all the “soak the rich” socialist rhetoric, along with a promise to end the foreign wars because he wasn’t a part of the Neocon Foreign Policy Establishment.
In order to prevent minorities from naturally gravitating to Trump and his message of economic populism, they had to resort to fearmongering and lies: “He’s a racist and he’s gonna persecute you!”
They have to continually tell minorities Trump is racist so that they don’t ever consider supporting him. His message is naturally unifying and appealing to most regular Americans of all races because the people he continually rails against are the Beltway Swamp, who are screwing everyone else over, and the radical left, who are causing a ruckus. It’s a small number of people. Everyone else, Trump wants to appeal to–and that’s a very large number of people.
Trump represents the possibility of turning a broad majority of the American people against the Beltway Swamp. And that is a mortal threat to not only the Democrats, but also the RINOs, who are every bit as entrenched in the Swamp as the Democrats.
This cannot be allowed to happen. So this is why the racial fearmongering has been cranked to the max the past five years or so. Minorities are the foundation of the Democratic Party.
And if they bolt for Trump, then there is no more Democratic Party.
***
For a while now I’ve been wondering how this country can avoid civil war and get back to a state of relative tranquility and unity–basically, how we can get back to pre-Ferguson America.
Things can either get better and simmer down, or they can get worse, and more than likely this country plunges into a civil war at some point in the future. The way things get worse is simple: the status quo of staunch racial and political division simply remains in place and gets taken to its logical conclusion.
What hasn’t been so clear, at least to me, is how things can actually get better.
But then I realized the answer was pretty simple: the way we avoid a civil war is if media stops trying to start a civil.
The media’s lying is the source of it all. It’s why we’re so divided, it’s why we can no longer tolerate one another, and it’s why there seems to be Two Americas today: because one America is living in the media’s alternate reality, and the other isn’t.
Rather than cover the substantive issues of the debate, the media chose to send the denizens of its alternate reality into racial hysteria after the debate because the President merely answered “sure” when asked if he condemns white supremacism.
It’s true that there wasn’t too much in the way of substance in the debate, so covering its substantive matters was a tall order. But I don’t even know if a genuinely substantive debate is possible today given the political climate of this country. The media has pushed this country to the brink of civil war, so naturally the Presidential debate reflected that. Additionally, it didn’t help that the “moderator” of the debate a dishonest Swamp Shill whose sole objective was to make Trump look as bad as possible.
Yes, Trump could’ve been more emphatic in his response. But it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run. They still would have made up a reason to call him a WHITE SUPREMACIST and a RACIST. Condemning white supremacism 20+ times in the past simply wasn’t enough for the media. No matter what he said on Tuesday night, they were always going to ask him the same question again. And again. And again. And again.
The problem is that the media is making this into the biggest story in America in a deliberate attempt to pour gasoline on the racial fire the media themselves started.
The media is the root of it all, and as long as the media continues doing what it’s doing, the country will continue breaking apart and heading towards a civil war or some other violent denouement.
Don’t watch the news. Don’t subscribe to cable. Don’t give the media clicks. When they lie and defame you, sue them mercilessly.
Just tune the media out entirely. There’s plenty of honest websites online where you can get your news from–and they’re far superior in quality to the Fake News media. Watch YouTube and other various streamers.
If no one is watching or reading, they won’t be in business for long.
The media is the source of it all. The media is the Swamp’s greatest weapon against us. It keeps us divided and fighting amongst ourselves rather than against the Swamp.
The media has to either change its ways or wither away. It’s the only way the country avoids civil war.