{"id":1887,"date":"2018-06-01T15:36:35","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T19:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1887"},"modified":"2018-06-01T15:53:07","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T19:53:07","slug":"ignorance-racism-industrial-complex-right-wing-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2018\/06\/ignorance-racism-industrial-complex-right-wing-thing.html","title":{"rendered":"Ignorance of the Racism-Industrial-Complex: It’s a Right-Wing Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Cole is an internet writer whose most recent piece<\/a>, \u201cIn Grudging Praise of White Racists,\u201d provides much food for thought.<\/p>\n

Cole\u2019s thesis is actually quite simple: While he personally has no use for \u201cright-wing white racism,\u201d he thinks that we may need to allow it a public space for no other reason but to let the \u201cwhite nationalists, white supremacists, and sieg heilers\u201d to function as a check of sorts on the \u201cleftist Nazism\u201d that is very rapidly becoming mainstream.\u00a0 Only if the latter is permitted to clash with the former will the majority of Americans recognize both expressions of \u201cextremism\u201d for the ugly specimens that they are.<\/p>\n

The general thrust of the author\u2019s thinking deserves sympathy: His point is gotten easily enough.\u00a0 Still, his analysis breaks down at several points.<\/p>\n

First, Cole\u2019s position reflects the extent to which \u201cleftist Nazism\u201d has gained control of the minds of even its self-styled opponents, folks like Cole.\u00a0 Kendrick Lamar, to whose treatment of a young white woman at one of his concerts Cole presents as an exhibit of \u201cleft-wing racism,\u201d doubtless acted like a classless jerk.\u00a0 The conduct of those leftist commentators who lionized him for castigating and humiliating this white fan for publically singing along with Lamar the racially-charged lyrics of one his pieces after<\/em> he had invited her on stage to do so are no less classless and contemptible.<\/p>\n

Still, they most definitely do not deserve to be lumped in with Hitler\u2019s Nazis<\/em>.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it\u2019s not difficult to discern why Cole is given to hurl charges of \u201cNazism\u201d at his opponents.\u00a0 Though historically and morally indefensible, politically speaking this reduction of one\u2019s opponents to the status of Nazis has proven to be an especially viable strategy.<\/p>\n

The problem for the Coles of the world is that it has proven to be a successful approach only for those on the hard left<\/em>, i.e. those on whom Cole (rightly) sets his sights on his piece.<\/p>\n

And this brings us to the next problem with Cole\u2019s assessment:<\/p>\n

In every conceivable respect\u2014socially, culturally, economically, politically, and even psychically<\/em>\u2014there is no parity between the two varieties of \u201cracism\u201d to which he alludes.\u00a0 The left\u2019s \u201cNazism\u201d long ago went mainstream.\u00a0 In fact, such has been the fortunes of the left that not only is it culturally and politically acceptable<\/em> to demonize white people; it is respectable <\/em>to do so.<\/p>\n

In 1967, Susan Sontag referred to white people as \u201cthe cancer\u201d of the human race.\u00a0 Admittedly, rarely do we hear public figures using language quite this explicit in their campaign to demoralize and dehumanize the white majority.\u00a0 Yet the campaign remains in full force and the sentiment that powers it is one and the same as that expressed by Sontag over a half-of-a-century ago.<\/p>\n

To put this point another way, Cole\u2019s argument, like that of virtually every person on the right who insists upon turning leftists\u2019 weapons of choice against them, utterly fails to accommodate one not-so-tiny detail.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s called the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).<\/p>\n

This is among the largest, quite possibly the <\/em>largest of industries in America.\u00a0 It is rapidly becoming among the largest industries throughout the Western world.\u00a0 There is no aspect of American life into which it hasn\u2019t spread its many tentacles.\u00a0 Indeed, it is omnipresent.<\/p>\n

Politicians, Democrat, Republican, and in between, make sure to grease the wheels of RIC, whether they\u2019re espousing nonsense about the country\u2019s having been founded<\/em> upon a \u201cproposition\u201d of Equality; praising a cardboard cut-out of Martin Luther King, Jr., a politically-useful fiction that they\u2019ve invented by isolating a few lines from King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech; focusing only on the problems of illegal <\/em>immigration while pretending that legal <\/em>immigration is problem-free; supporting or refraining from criticizing race-based preferential\u00a0 treatment policies for blacks; and ignoring the astronomical rates and often horrific nature of black-on-white criminality while speaking of blacks as victims, either of \u201cracism\u201d (if the speaker is a Democrat) or the Welfare-State (if one is a Republican).<\/p>\n

Of course, given that trillions of dollars have been spent on the War on Poverty since the 1960s, a war launched principally on the basis of rectifying centuries of discrimination against American blacks, this too is a central feature of RIC, one to which anyone who aspires to be successful in politics knows that he must defer.<\/p>\n

RIC has completely saturated our educational system, from kindergarten through college.\u00a0 Public institutions are obviously most directly affected, but neither have private schools escaped its gravitational pull.<\/p>\n

Christian churches have been infiltrated by RIC.<\/p>\n

The media, both the standard \u201cmainstream\u201d or \u201clegacy\u201d media as well as its \u201cright-wing\u201d alternative, what some refer to as \u201cConservatism Inc.\u201d and what I call \u201cBig Conservatism\u201d (or the Big Con<\/em>), facilitate RIC.<\/p>\n

And, obviously, throughout the arts, the entertainment industry, RIC is on full display.<\/p>\n

As I write this, ABC cancelled the highest rated prime time series, Roseanne, <\/em>because its leading lady tweeted that former Obama adviser, Valerie Jarrett, looks like the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and The Planet of the Apes. Although Roseanne has insisted that she didn\u2019t know Jarrett was black (and who would know this just by looking at Jarrett?), and although she apologized, her tweet has been unequivocally condemned by Big Media, \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201cconservative\u201d alike, as unadulterated \u201cracist hate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Racism-Industrial-Complex never rests.<\/p>\n

Cole\u2019s generally sound goal notwithstanding, what he apparently doesn\u2019t grasp is that insofar as he insists upon accusing those to his right and left of being Nazis and racists, he reinforces the very juggernaut whose influence he wants to diminish.\u00a0 The idea that \u201cracism\u201d is the worst of all transgressions, coupled with the notion that right-wing \u201cwhite supremacists\u201d pose a culturally-significant threat\u2014ideas that Cole seems to endorse\u2014are leftist fantasies.\u00a0 They are the fuel for the engine of the Racism-Industrial-Complex.<\/p>\n

Cole does, however, seem to be on sturdier ground when he suggests that we would be better off divesting Political Correctness of its sting by assuming a more nonchalant attitude toward it.<\/p>\n

Yet we will also stand a better chance of starving the beast by refraining from making some version or other of the argument ad Hitlerium<\/em> at every available opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Cole is an internet writer whose most recent piece, \u201cIn Grudging Praise of White Racists,\u201d provides much food for thought. Cole\u2019s thesis is actually quite simple: While he personally has no use for \u201cright-wing white racism,\u201d he thinks that we may need to allow it a public space for no other reason but to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIgnorance of the Racism-Industrial-Complex: It's a Right-Wing Thing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2018\/06\/ignorance-racism-industrial-complex-right-wing-thing.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ignorance of the Racism-Industrial-Complex: It's a Right-Wing Thing\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"David Cole is an internet writer whose most recent piece, \u201cIn Grudging Praise of White Racists,\u201d provides much food for thought. 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