Thanks for reading another one of my articles, Mr. Custer, and for offering your responses to it. I’ll address each of your points:
- On the subject of what I referred to as “non-existent white supremacy,” if you notice there was a hyperlink there, and it was to this article I’d written a bit earlier:
Since I’ve addressed my broader thoughts on what gets called “white supremacy” today in that article, I won’t repeat all those thoughts here. I’ll just say this. I agree with you that actual white supremacists, while still a tiny minority, do constitute a growing threat, and I agree that Trump does things to egg them on, but what I’d invite you to ask yourself is why. Why is Trump our president right now in the first place? I hate to give you yet another link, but for better or worse, it’s an issue I’ve addressed in some detail here:
The general idea of this article, which is one that has some relevant facts and statistics in it, is that I agree with those who claim Trump was elected in large part due to his racial appeals. That is, I believe he was elected in large part on the strength of his being willing to speak out against political correctness and speak out for the white silent majority. Where I disagree with most of the people on the left who’ve made this point is that they think that white people went nuts when Obama was elected and re-elected, panicked, and then came out to vote for Trump. That theory doesn’t get support from the empirical evidence, because Obama got a massive amount of white support, and many of the same voters that voted for Obama in 2008 turned around and voted for Trump in 2016 (I document those claims in the article above). Why did they do that? It’s not like these people who’d vote for our first black President just became racist in the course of a few years. And I don’t think it’s Obama’s fault either. What happened is that a bunch of currents that had been building up for awhile within the increasingly radicalized halls of humanities and social sciences in academia and in the media came together when Ferguson happened and started giving us a completely over-the-top racialized version of reality, where every story was about race, there attacks on white people, whiteness, white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy, etc. all over the media, and finally, many white people decided they’d had enough. They were forced to become more conscious of their own race and to identify with that race as a result of this massive attack coming from the regressive segments of the left. And they voted for the only candidate who was speaking to them, the one who wasn’t afraid to violate P.C. orthodoxies and say the “forbidden” things that were on their minds. I think that’s the context in which you should see Trump. He’s the effect, not the cause, and yes, he’s making some things worse, but he’s not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the cancer of identity politics that keep dividing us based on race and keep making more and more black people and white people incredibly conscious of what group they belong to. The longer that goes on, and the more these race-crazed nuts on the regressive left keep talking about illusory white supremacy, the more real white supremacists we’ll see. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- As far as Ilhan Omar, she didn’t just make one anti-Semitic comment and then apologize. She’s now made a whole bunch of them, and she hasn’t even apologized for most of them. She’s very clearly anti-Semitic. I don’t have a dog in this fight as between Israelis and Palestinians or between Jews and Muslims. There are good and bad people within each group. I also generally think America should get out of the Middle East and leave people to sort out their own problems instead of entangling us in complicated disputes that we can’t really resolve anyway. Though I didn’t vote in the last election, one reason I mostly supported Trump over Clinton is his anti-interventionist foreign policy, and he’s actually, thus far, been not too bad in sticking to his promises in this area. For example, when Assad used chemical weapons, Trump authorized a targeted and effective strike and then quickly got out. He didn’t get us entangled. And he’s taking steps to disentangle us from Iraq and Afghanistan. So I’m good with that. I wish he were a bit more neutral on the whole Israelis/Palestinians issue, and I also wish he’d stop this brinksmanship with Iran, but all told, as I said, he’s not bad, especially when I compare him to what I’d expect Hillary Clinton to have gotten us involved in by now.
- On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when I say she’s uneducated, I’m not talking about her formal education. George W. Bush went to Yale (he was a legacy, of course), but that didn’t stop him from being a total ignoramus and, as I’ve said before, the worst president in my memory. So it’s not about whether or not someone went to college for me. It comes down to whether they actually know what they’re talking about, and every time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opens her very big mouth, she says something ignorant and ludicrous. Most of her ideas were, it seems, being spoonfed to her by her chief of staff, since, after right after he resigned recently after being involved in a scandal, her Tweeting and speaking out about everything subsided drastically. Keep in mind, by the way, that I’m a fan of Bernie Sanders (not all his ideas, but some of them, and I think he has integrity), so this isn’t about the ideology of socialism; it’s about who she is as a person and as a politician.
We probably, again, won’t reach total agreement on these issues, but hopefully that gives you more of a sense of where I’m coming from.
