A point Douglas Murray commonly makes is that our society suffers from a shortage of real Nazis; because the radical left desperately wants to fight such a force of pure evil that would justify any action taken against it, but they so rarely can find any. Either the last couple years has witnessed an amazing turn around for Nazis, as sightings and reported hate crimes have skyrocketed, or a complete mental meltdown by radicals who see phantasmal enemies everywhere. A few simple and uncontroversial facts need to frame any look at this: first, the vast majority of religious hate crimes in the United States remain targeted at Jews who nevertheless enjoy less support than ever from radicals as they lost their place on the semi-official Oppression Hierarchy. Secondly the crimes given the most attention have almost mostly proven to be hoaxes. The head of the University of Missouri’s chapter of Black Lives Matter cried bloody murder that students were in danger as he had seen a march of fully enrobed KKK members marching across the grounds. His compatriots joined in on the urgent call to make the campus safe from the marauding horde and several of his fellows reported witnessing the same event. At a protest for free speech at the University of Toronto leftist radicals reported a large contingent of neo-Nazis among their opponents (which naturally justified their own acts of violence and disruption against a seemingly innocuous stance).
Professor Confronted by lunatics.
At another university a robed and hooded Klansman was spotted, through the window, inside a faculty office The problem is these incidents only occurred inside the heads of their reporters, and what makes this a moral panic, the idea spread like a virus to their supporters many of whom reported witnessing the same events despite never having seen them. The word of their fellows was enough to make it real for them, but its a convenient stance for political extremists since they see it as discrediting their opponents. Hundreds if not thousands of students of different persuasions would have seen a KKK rally in the middle of Mizzou’s campus, and there would be ample pictures and video, yet none ever materialized. Numerous cameras captured the protest in Toronto, yet no Nazis were sighted, and the Klansman sitting around a faculty office turned out to be a sheet draped over a lamp. The skyrocketing of reports turns out to be mostly an in increase in hoaxes especially when it comes to campuses. So in Toronto, those SJWs demanded a professor denounce the Nazis which existed only in their own heads.
All that shows more about how radicals view American society than anything else. The occasional person wearing a truly offensive Halloween costume, such as blackface, is equated to society at large as a common event. This is a large part of the premise of the movie (and now Netflix series) Dear White People, but the so-called proof of such displays being commonplace was cherry picked from across the entire country (and possibly further); somehow this is still considered widespread behavior and thus collective guilt. To be fair true racists have not entirely gone away, but they have become so few in number as to become an irrelevance. The new wave or right wing demonstrations, largely a response to violence perpetrated by groups like Antifa, drive out anyone displaying overtly racist symbols; however by not acting so overtly some of these people have effectively screened themselves by blending into these crowds while looking for opportunities to get into clashes with radical leftists. By contrast, Antifa can mobilize independent mobs sometimes in the hundreds while openly calling for violence. Kill the Nazis they say, plus the libertarians who call for free speech and the liberals get the bullet too. As Wizar of Cause (a center-leftist former union organizer) has warned:
Liberals, Antifa are not your ally.
This is far from limited to campus crazies as mainstream sources openly carry the calls to violence, though in a watered down form, calling for beatings of political opponents. All the way back in 2008 the Young Turks started calling for the direct use of street violence to silence political enemies, and in the last year similar calls have entered the mainstream with celebrities openly and directly calling for violent revolution and disposal of their political opponents.
Openly calling for violent uprisings.
A mediocre writer responds to several people being savagely beaten by Antifa in Berkeley by calling for more.
The difference is about timidity and degree not about the type or motivation of action especially when you take into account that innocuous forms of speech (the so-called microaggressions) increasingly get defined as violence.
This is one of the areas where history truly repeats itself, as the justification for the ‘direct action’ (a current euphemism for violence) and suppression is always framed as defensive. People are always ready to believe as fact what backs up what they already like to think no matter how shocking. For a right-wing equivalent, the rumors about a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza restaurant dubbed Pizza-gate continue to circulate and even led a man to storm the restaurant with a gun. Rumors spread to make political opponents seem more than wrong, but actually demonic, have an exaggerated affect on people with an already limited grasp on reality.
The press has become the witchfinder generals of this wave as they gleefully repeat claims no matter how bizarre if they back the narrative about some massive and resurging neo-Nazi movement. To prove Pepe the Frog was a racist symbol, and trying to back up similar claims made by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in its floundering finals weeks, CNN manufactured an image of him in a KKK hood and several groups accepted the claims by a known internet troll Jared Taylor Swift (how did they not figure out he was a troll just from that name) that the frogman was the symbol of the Alt-Right. That it was already one of the most common memes on the internet did not mean simply that racists also used it (they also drink water so maybe that makes water racist), but that this movement was indeed large since it was so common. Now the drinking of milk in public has been deemed a racist act, and so has this hand sign:
This could all be ignored if it were not uncritically repeated again and again, with the actual neo-Nazis (and random internet trolls) playing along to make the media at large look bad; however there is a level of opportunism in all this since the media have used this scare to drive advertisers from sites such as Youtube in the hopes they would come back, and this is not an unknown feature to moral panics where a few of those inciting them have a monetary incentive (even if they might believe it they have an extra reason to push things along).
Kraut and Tea on the Pewdiepie ‘scandal’
There’s a certain stereotype I saw in English literature of the moral busybodies being people of mediocre talents (especially intelligence), but considerable education (at least to themselves). It seems our society has taken to producing droves of such people who think they should be able to run the world, but can’t run their own lives, and they center on college campuses. Naturally the student crazies almost every time they issue demands want jobs created for them so they never have to leave the campuses which have become their only natural habitat (the idea of real work having become repugnant to these self-styled proliterians).
The case of Bret Weinstein is just the latest example of on campus insanity, but it provides plenty of fodder for debate. One of the most illuminating statements by the lunatics is a demand for the video they took of themselves confronting the professor (and acting lick assclowns), be taken off the internet (as if their school had such power) as it was stolen by ‘White Supremacists’ since apparently all their opponents are such.
More details about the situation at Evergreen.
The word racist, for radicals and their supporters, has changed from being about an attitude and opinion to representing some shadowy demonic force all around them which is responsible for all the world’s wrongs. For years people have gotten doctorates for such claims as glaciers are racist and white marble statues are white supremacist (and carbon fiber material is sexist), so it’s no surprise people have started acting out the insanity which has been peddled. Outside of radical circles it has become the great sin, and the closest we have for infidel or apostate or heretic (with their fully loaded meanings). What they truly signify is a casting out of someone so that any and all actions taken against them are not only allowed but laudable, identifying someone not as part of society but as an other–a threat to society’s very existence.
Ashes and Temples 