Do you think it is based on anything else besides the results mentioned ?? )
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"Racism" is nothing but a distraction driven by politicians and the media
- Thread starter casa_mugrienta
- Start date
Yes.Do you think it is based on anything else besides the results mentioned ?? )
MOLLY
[00:01:15] Daryl, I want to start, you know, you’re a musician by trade, but over the decades, you’ve also come to be known as an activist. Can you tell us how you came into that identity? What initiated it?
DARYL
[00:01:27] OK, well, first you have to understand my background. I’m the child of parents in the US Foreign Service. So, I spent a lot of my formative years traveling all over the world, going to school overseas. I did kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, you know, overseas. My first exposure to school was in a multicultural environment overseas. My classmates were Nigerian, Italian, German, French, Japanese, Russian. However, when I would return back home here to my own country, the United States, I would either be in all Black schools or Black and White schools, meaning they’re still segregated or newly integrated. Even though desegregation was passed by the Supreme Court in 1954, it didn’t just happen overnight. Took years and years. Right?
MOLLY
I mean, arguably, it’s still happening.
DARYL
[00:02:20] Is still happening. Exactly. Exactly. So one of those years when I came back, I was age 10 in the fourth grade and I was one of two Black kids in the entire school. So consequently, all of my friends were White and they were, you know, fourth and fifth graders. Many of my guy friends were members of the Cub Scouts and they invited me to join. So I joined and we had a parade one day along with the Girl Scouts brownies 4H club and Boy Scouts. And I was the only Black participant in this parade in this march. Everything was going along fine. We got to a certain point in this route when suddenly I was getting hit with bottles and soda pop cans and small debris from the street by just a small group of White spectators off to my right on the sidewalk. Now, having never experienced anything like this, I thought those people over there don’t like the scouts. That’s how naive I was. It wasn’t until my scout leaders, who also were all White adults, came running over to me and covered me with their own bodies and quickly escorted me out of the danger that I realized I was the target because nobody else in my troop was getting this special protection. And I kept asking them, why are they doing this to me? What did I do? I didn’t do anything. Why are they doing this to me? At the end of the march, I went home and my parents who were not there, who were not present at the parade, they were putting bandaids on me and cleaning me up and asking me, how did you fall down and get all scraped up? I told them exactly what had happened. And for the first time in my life, at the age of ten, my parents sat me down and explained to me what racism was. Believe it or not, I had never even heard the word racism, at the age of ten. When my parents told me why this was happening to me. I did not believe them. I literally thought they were lying to me.
MOLLY
What did they say exactly?
DARYL
[00:04:20] They told me it was because of the color of my skin. And some people have this issue where, you know, they may dislike or hate someone of a different skin color or different religion and things like that. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never even heard of that before, let alone seen it before.
MOLLY
What’s interesting is that you were coming into this knowledge, what I think must have been one of the heights of the civil rights era. So there was this larger conversation that happened that for you you had been mostly isolated from, but now you are coming into it.
DARYL
[00:04:54] Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I walked away not believing my parents. Well about a month and a half, two months later that same year, 1968 on April the 4th, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I remember it very, very well. Every major city in this country burned to the ground, all in the name of racism. I realized my parents had not lied to me. They told me the truth. This thing called racism does exist. But what I didn’t know was why does it exist? So at that age, I formed a question in my own mind, which was, how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? It just baffled my mind. So for the next 53 years I’ve been on a journey to get that question answered. As an adolescent, I bought tons of books on Black supremacy, White supremacy, the Nazis in Germany, the neo-Nazis over here, the Ku Klux Klan. Anybody who had a sense of superiority I want to learn about because I knew you were not born with that, it was acquired. Where does it come from? Where is it going? How can it be addressed? And I would ask people, you know, why are people like this? Oh, Darryl, you know, some people are just like that, that’s just the way it is. Well, that’s not a good enough answer. So lo and behold, I graduated college with my degree in music.
MOLLY
And you went to Howard University?
DARYL
[00:06:16] I went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., got my degree in jazz. And, while music became my profession, studying race relations became my obsession. I later joined a country music band. Country music had made a repopularization here in the country. I was the only Black guy in the band and usually the only Black person where we played. And there was a place called the Silver Dollar Lounge up in our town called Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour and 20 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. The Silver Dollar Lounge was known as an all White lounge. They didn’t have signs posted or anything like that saying, you know, White people only like that, no coloreds allowed or whatever. But the reputation was known. And Black people simply did not go in there. They knew, you know, when you try to go somewhere where you’re not welcome and alcohol is being served, it’s not a good combination. I came off the bandstand with the band on a break after the first set and a White gentleman came up behind me and put his arm around my shoulder. Now, I don’t know anybody in here, right? So I’m trying to see who’s touching me. And he has a big smile on his face. And he’s praising the band and saying how much he enjoyed the music. And he says, you know, this is the first time I ever heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. I was rather surprised because this guy was at least a decade and a half older than me. And I was surprised that he did not know the Black origin of Jerry Lee Lewis’s, you know, rollicking piano style, which came from Black blues and boogie woogie piano players. So, I explained that to him and he didn’t believe me. Even after I I said, look, man, you know, Jerry Lee Lewis is a very good friend of mine. He told me himself. He didn’t believe that either. But he was so fascinated with me as a novelty or something, he invited me back to his table. He took his glass and he, like, clinks my glass and cheers me. And then he says, you know, this is the first time I ever sat down, had a drink with a Black man. Now I’m completely mystified like how can this be? So innocently, I asked him why? At first he stared down at the table top and did not answer me. I asked him again and his buddy sitting next to him elbowed him and said, tell him, tell him, tell him. And I said, Tell me. And he says to me, I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, I burst out laughing at him because I know a lot about the Klan. And I know they don’t just come up to you and hug a Black guy and praise their talent, want to hang out and buy him a drink. No, it doesn’t work that way. So this guy is joking with me. I’m laughing. He goes inside his pocket, pulls out his wallet, produces his Klan membership card and hands it to me. I recognize the Klan insignia, which is a red circle with a White cross and a red blood drop in the center of the cross. This thing was for real. So I stop laughing because it wasn’t funny anymore.
READ MORE HERE !! )
[00:01:15] Daryl, I want to start, you know, you’re a musician by trade, but over the decades, you’ve also come to be known as an activist. Can you tell us how you came into that identity? What initiated it?
DARYL
[00:01:27] OK, well, first you have to understand my background. I’m the child of parents in the US Foreign Service. So, I spent a lot of my formative years traveling all over the world, going to school overseas. I did kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, you know, overseas. My first exposure to school was in a multicultural environment overseas. My classmates were Nigerian, Italian, German, French, Japanese, Russian. However, when I would return back home here to my own country, the United States, I would either be in all Black schools or Black and White schools, meaning they’re still segregated or newly integrated. Even though desegregation was passed by the Supreme Court in 1954, it didn’t just happen overnight. Took years and years. Right?
MOLLY
I mean, arguably, it’s still happening.
DARYL
[00:02:20] Is still happening. Exactly. Exactly. So one of those years when I came back, I was age 10 in the fourth grade and I was one of two Black kids in the entire school. So consequently, all of my friends were White and they were, you know, fourth and fifth graders. Many of my guy friends were members of the Cub Scouts and they invited me to join. So I joined and we had a parade one day along with the Girl Scouts brownies 4H club and Boy Scouts. And I was the only Black participant in this parade in this march. Everything was going along fine. We got to a certain point in this route when suddenly I was getting hit with bottles and soda pop cans and small debris from the street by just a small group of White spectators off to my right on the sidewalk. Now, having never experienced anything like this, I thought those people over there don’t like the scouts. That’s how naive I was. It wasn’t until my scout leaders, who also were all White adults, came running over to me and covered me with their own bodies and quickly escorted me out of the danger that I realized I was the target because nobody else in my troop was getting this special protection. And I kept asking them, why are they doing this to me? What did I do? I didn’t do anything. Why are they doing this to me? At the end of the march, I went home and my parents who were not there, who were not present at the parade, they were putting bandaids on me and cleaning me up and asking me, how did you fall down and get all scraped up? I told them exactly what had happened. And for the first time in my life, at the age of ten, my parents sat me down and explained to me what racism was. Believe it or not, I had never even heard the word racism, at the age of ten. When my parents told me why this was happening to me. I did not believe them. I literally thought they were lying to me.
MOLLY
What did they say exactly?
DARYL
[00:04:20] They told me it was because of the color of my skin. And some people have this issue where, you know, they may dislike or hate someone of a different skin color or different religion and things like that. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never even heard of that before, let alone seen it before.
MOLLY
What’s interesting is that you were coming into this knowledge, what I think must have been one of the heights of the civil rights era. So there was this larger conversation that happened that for you you had been mostly isolated from, but now you are coming into it.
DARYL
[00:04:54] Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I walked away not believing my parents. Well about a month and a half, two months later that same year, 1968 on April the 4th, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I remember it very, very well. Every major city in this country burned to the ground, all in the name of racism. I realized my parents had not lied to me. They told me the truth. This thing called racism does exist. But what I didn’t know was why does it exist? So at that age, I formed a question in my own mind, which was, how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? It just baffled my mind. So for the next 53 years I’ve been on a journey to get that question answered. As an adolescent, I bought tons of books on Black supremacy, White supremacy, the Nazis in Germany, the neo-Nazis over here, the Ku Klux Klan. Anybody who had a sense of superiority I want to learn about because I knew you were not born with that, it was acquired. Where does it come from? Where is it going? How can it be addressed? And I would ask people, you know, why are people like this? Oh, Darryl, you know, some people are just like that, that’s just the way it is. Well, that’s not a good enough answer. So lo and behold, I graduated college with my degree in music.
MOLLY
And you went to Howard University?
DARYL
[00:06:16] I went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., got my degree in jazz. And, while music became my profession, studying race relations became my obsession. I later joined a country music band. Country music had made a repopularization here in the country. I was the only Black guy in the band and usually the only Black person where we played. And there was a place called the Silver Dollar Lounge up in our town called Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour and 20 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. The Silver Dollar Lounge was known as an all White lounge. They didn’t have signs posted or anything like that saying, you know, White people only like that, no coloreds allowed or whatever. But the reputation was known. And Black people simply did not go in there. They knew, you know, when you try to go somewhere where you’re not welcome and alcohol is being served, it’s not a good combination. I came off the bandstand with the band on a break after the first set and a White gentleman came up behind me and put his arm around my shoulder. Now, I don’t know anybody in here, right? So I’m trying to see who’s touching me. And he has a big smile on his face. And he’s praising the band and saying how much he enjoyed the music. And he says, you know, this is the first time I ever heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. I was rather surprised because this guy was at least a decade and a half older than me. And I was surprised that he did not know the Black origin of Jerry Lee Lewis’s, you know, rollicking piano style, which came from Black blues and boogie woogie piano players. So, I explained that to him and he didn’t believe me. Even after I I said, look, man, you know, Jerry Lee Lewis is a very good friend of mine. He told me himself. He didn’t believe that either. But he was so fascinated with me as a novelty or something, he invited me back to his table. He took his glass and he, like, clinks my glass and cheers me. And then he says, you know, this is the first time I ever sat down, had a drink with a Black man. Now I’m completely mystified like how can this be? So innocently, I asked him why? At first he stared down at the table top and did not answer me. I asked him again and his buddy sitting next to him elbowed him and said, tell him, tell him, tell him. And I said, Tell me. And he says to me, I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, I burst out laughing at him because I know a lot about the Klan. And I know they don’t just come up to you and hug a Black guy and praise their talent, want to hang out and buy him a drink. No, it doesn’t work that way. So this guy is joking with me. I’m laughing. He goes inside his pocket, pulls out his wallet, produces his Klan membership card and hands it to me. I recognize the Klan insignia, which is a red circle with a White cross and a red blood drop in the center of the cross. This thing was for real. So I stop laughing because it wasn’t funny anymore.
READ MORE HERE !! )
Blues Musician Challenges White Supremacy One KKK Member at a Time | American Civil Liberties Union
As the political divide deepens through disinformation campaigns about the election results, vaccines, 9/11, and more, it can feel like unity and consensus are shrinking on the horizon. And yet, the only way to address the pandemic or the fault lines in our democracy is if we can bridge the...www.aclu.org
to those who have served !! ( :
Happy Veterans Day !! )
www.nationalgeographic.com
Happy Veterans Day !! )
The Marines were last to integrate. Here are the stories of the first Black recruits.
80 years after the Montford Point Camp was established to train enlisted African Americans, relatives and other Marines fight to document their contributions before it’s too late.
www.nationalgeographic.com
Daylight savings time is racist…
Well, at least we might have a chacne of actually getting rid of it nowDaylight savings time is racist…
I don’t care if they make lunchtime called 4am. Just stop changing it
No, legislation is pending to make it permanent !! )
1972-2006 dint change a clock once !! )
the adjacent county to the west changed twice a year (Chicago time !! )
the adjacent county to the north changed twice a year (New York time !! )
then those fvcking communist republicans wanted to be like everyone else !! ) (except Arizona !!
)the older I get the more I dislike it !! )
Hawaii and Arizona don't change, and it wouldn't affect my life at all except since everyone else changes it screws up stuff at work and messes up when my radio shows and football games come on1972-2006 dint change a clock once !! )
the adjacent county to the west changed twice a year (Chicago time !! )
the adjacent county to the north changed twice a year (New York time !! )
then those fvcking communist republicans wanted to be like everyone else !! ) (except Arizona !!
the older I get the more I dislike it !! )
I remember preferring the "summer" configuration when we were aligned with "Chicago time" to the west !! )wouldn't affect my life at all except since everyone else changes it screws up stuff at work and messes up when my radio shows and football games come on
What We Ask of Black American Athletes
The captain of the U.S. soccer team is the latest in a long line of sports stars who have had to wrestle with a complex legacy on the world stage.
www.theatlantic.com
A Ploy, Not a Principle
Republican criticism of the Mar-a-Lago dinner with a Holocaust denier will be disavowed if Trump looks to be winning the party’s 2024 nomination.
www.theatlantic.com
If Trump-endorsed candidates had done better in the November midterms, if Republicans had won the Senate and were not now poised to lose another race in Georgia, if the party’s prospective 2024 money was not uniting behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then excuses would be made for Trump’s latest outrage, just as excuses were made for his previous outrages. What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: “They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong.”
David Frum: Another flop from GOP productions
By way of illustration, compare two Wall Street Journal articles five years apart. Here is yesterday’s editorial about the Trump-Fuentes dinner, a clear and forceful demand for personal responsibility:
Stinging. Now here’s the Journal’s editorial after the racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations by “some very fine people,” as Trump called them, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017—when demanding personal responsibility of Trump was to be avoided at all costs:
In 2017, Trump was necessary, and so he had to be defended. In 2022, Trump is inconvenient, and so he can be condemned.
But only Trump. There’s going to be no condemnation of Kevin McCarthy for basing his power in the House on the political circle associated with Trump’s dinner guests. McCarthy is necessary, and so he has to be defended.
Trump was once caught on audio expressing his core philosophy of scandal management: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He did not think through the corollary: When you cease to be a star, they stop letting you do it. For big-dollar Republicans, Trump has ceased to be a star.
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“You’re not a Nazi. You don’t deserve to be called that,” Jones says.
“Well, I see good things about Hitler,” Kanye replied.
In the interview, Jones tries to do damage control, telling West that “I’m not on that whole Jew thing” and cutting to a commercial just after West once again affirms, “I like Hitler.” But he couldn’t unring the bell. West, whom Jones was trying to stand up as a kind of free speech martyr, had expressed his support for Hitler. The effort to claim his celebrity for Jones’s cause had blown up in his face. (Jones has disavowed antisemitism in the past.)
What West says in this interview is despicable. His evolution into America’s most famous antisemite has almost certainly emboldened the antisemitic fringe — perhaps even endangering Jews.
In the process, West has also inadvertently exposed people like Jones for what they really are: wink-nudge enablers of antisemitism.
Since Donald Trump brought the far right into the GOP mainstream back in 2015, it has become increasingly common to hear coded language about Jews: attacks on “globalists” or “George Soros” that provide the speaker plausible deniability while signaling to antisemites that they’re on their side.
When Jews and anti-hate groups criticize these dog whistles, the people deploying them act shocked. “How dare you call us antisemitic! Why are you trying to shut down open discussion about the liberal agenda? Cancel culture!”
In the past few weeks, as West has drifted toward fringe conspiracy theories, many of these same actors have courted him as a potential ally. Donald Trump had dinner with him, Tucker Carlson had him on his show, and an official GOP Twitter account celebrated him. They all seemed to assume that West knew how to play the game — sell the anti-woke message, maybe even broadcast some dog whistles to the fringe, without actually crossing the line into out-and-out hate speech.
They were wrong.
How Kanye West killed the GOP’s plausible deniability
Related video
The current controversy started on the night of October 8, when Kanye West tweeted that he planned to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Two days after the tweet, which got West suspended from Twitter and set off a firestorm of controversy, Carlson aired an interview with West claiming that he was being silenced for being a free thinker.
“Crazy? That was not our conclusion. We’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes,” Carlson told his audience.
In the interview, West went in on many of Carlson’s favorite topics. He railed against the alleged “genocide of the Black race” being perpetrated by Planned Parenthood and accuses “liberal Nazis” of trying to silence him (at this point, West still seemed to understand you should say that Nazis are bad).
After the interview aired, Vice acquired some of the footage that Carlson had cut from the conversation. In the clips, West expresses some paranoid beliefs — like that “fake children” and “professional actors” had been placed in his home to “sexualize [his] kids” — and made a series of strange and/or bigoted comments about Jews. “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering,” West told Carlson.
Of course, editing out those parts made sense from Carlson’s perspective. These clips showed the lie in Carlson’s claim that Kanye did not appear “crazy” in the interview. He knew what West had really said, how bizarre and offensive the uncut interview was. By cutting the (relatively) unhinged portions, Carlson could present a (relatively) mainstream West as a martyr for the conservative cause — and save West from his own blatantly antisemitic remarks.
Carlson is, of course, fluent in dog whistle. When he wants to blame immigration on a globe-spanning conspiracy, he singles out George Soros — a Holocaust survivor and billionaire funder of liberal causes — rather than pointing at Jews per se. You can’t prove that he really meant Jews, but the fringe right knows what they’re hearing (as some Jewish observers have repeatedly noted).
“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former employee of the Carlson-founded Daily Caller who was revealed to have written for a white nationalist website under a pseudonym, said in a 2021 podcast.
“He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on [white nationalist websites] VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
For years, anti-hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League have warned about this tactic: about how attacks on Soros or uses of terms like “globalist,” now mainstream on the right, emerged out of the fever swamp and now serve to embolden its denizens. But they have largely been ignored and dismissed on the Republican side — which has been busy, in the past several weeks, claiming West as one of theirs.
A few days prior to the “death con” tweet, an official House GOP Twitter account claimed West as part of a new Republican pantheon (alongside Trump and Elon Musk):
Kanye West and the end of “wink-nudge” antisemitism
The tweet stayed up after West’s tweet and the revelations about what he really said on Carlson’s show. It took his descent into outright Nazi admiration on Thursday for the GOP to finally decide that enough was enough and delete the tweet.
Over the holiday weekend, well after West’s views on Jews were clear, Donald Trump sat down for dinner with him (and infamous white nationalist Nick Fuentes, also present at the Jones interview). Afterward, Trump defended his decision to meet with Kanye — a longtime supporter of his — by saying West “asked to see me for advice.” As open as West had been about his antisemitism at this point, it still wasn’t bad enough for Trump to cut ties with him.
It is likely, after the Jones interview, that West will become a full pariah. Praising Hitler is pretty much the one universally accepted cancelable offense.
But in doing so, West revealed what lurks behind the kind of rhetoric that mainstream conservatives are willing to employ and the sorts of forces they’re willing to ally themselves with when it’s deemed politically convenient. We know what some part of their audience hears when they blame “George Soros” for migrant caravans and rail against “globalist” plots against America.
Kanye West has bombed his career. The right’s plausible deniability is collateral damage.
“Well, I see good things about Hitler,” Kanye replied.
In the interview, Jones tries to do damage control, telling West that “I’m not on that whole Jew thing” and cutting to a commercial just after West once again affirms, “I like Hitler.” But he couldn’t unring the bell. West, whom Jones was trying to stand up as a kind of free speech martyr, had expressed his support for Hitler. The effort to claim his celebrity for Jones’s cause had blown up in his face. (Jones has disavowed antisemitism in the past.)
What West says in this interview is despicable. His evolution into America’s most famous antisemite has almost certainly emboldened the antisemitic fringe — perhaps even endangering Jews.
In the process, West has also inadvertently exposed people like Jones for what they really are: wink-nudge enablers of antisemitism.
Since Donald Trump brought the far right into the GOP mainstream back in 2015, it has become increasingly common to hear coded language about Jews: attacks on “globalists” or “George Soros” that provide the speaker plausible deniability while signaling to antisemites that they’re on their side.
When Jews and anti-hate groups criticize these dog whistles, the people deploying them act shocked. “How dare you call us antisemitic! Why are you trying to shut down open discussion about the liberal agenda? Cancel culture!”
In the past few weeks, as West has drifted toward fringe conspiracy theories, many of these same actors have courted him as a potential ally. Donald Trump had dinner with him, Tucker Carlson had him on his show, and an official GOP Twitter account celebrated him. They all seemed to assume that West knew how to play the game — sell the anti-woke message, maybe even broadcast some dog whistles to the fringe, without actually crossing the line into out-and-out hate speech.
They were wrong.
How Kanye West killed the GOP’s plausible deniability
Related video
The current controversy started on the night of October 8, when Kanye West tweeted that he planned to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Two days after the tweet, which got West suspended from Twitter and set off a firestorm of controversy, Carlson aired an interview with West claiming that he was being silenced for being a free thinker.
“Crazy? That was not our conclusion. We’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes,” Carlson told his audience.
In the interview, West went in on many of Carlson’s favorite topics. He railed against the alleged “genocide of the Black race” being perpetrated by Planned Parenthood and accuses “liberal Nazis” of trying to silence him (at this point, West still seemed to understand you should say that Nazis are bad).
After the interview aired, Vice acquired some of the footage that Carlson had cut from the conversation. In the clips, West expresses some paranoid beliefs — like that “fake children” and “professional actors” had been placed in his home to “sexualize [his] kids” — and made a series of strange and/or bigoted comments about Jews. “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering,” West told Carlson.
Of course, editing out those parts made sense from Carlson’s perspective. These clips showed the lie in Carlson’s claim that Kanye did not appear “crazy” in the interview. He knew what West had really said, how bizarre and offensive the uncut interview was. By cutting the (relatively) unhinged portions, Carlson could present a (relatively) mainstream West as a martyr for the conservative cause — and save West from his own blatantly antisemitic remarks.
Carlson is, of course, fluent in dog whistle. When he wants to blame immigration on a globe-spanning conspiracy, he singles out George Soros — a Holocaust survivor and billionaire funder of liberal causes — rather than pointing at Jews per se. You can’t prove that he really meant Jews, but the fringe right knows what they’re hearing (as some Jewish observers have repeatedly noted).
“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former employee of the Carlson-founded Daily Caller who was revealed to have written for a white nationalist website under a pseudonym, said in a 2021 podcast.
“He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on [white nationalist websites] VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
For years, anti-hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League have warned about this tactic: about how attacks on Soros or uses of terms like “globalist,” now mainstream on the right, emerged out of the fever swamp and now serve to embolden its denizens. But they have largely been ignored and dismissed on the Republican side — which has been busy, in the past several weeks, claiming West as one of theirs.
A few days prior to the “death con” tweet, an official House GOP Twitter account claimed West as part of a new Republican pantheon (alongside Trump and Elon Musk):
Kanye West and the end of “wink-nudge” antisemitism
The tweet stayed up after West’s tweet and the revelations about what he really said on Carlson’s show. It took his descent into outright Nazi admiration on Thursday for the GOP to finally decide that enough was enough and delete the tweet.
Over the holiday weekend, well after West’s views on Jews were clear, Donald Trump sat down for dinner with him (and infamous white nationalist Nick Fuentes, also present at the Jones interview). Afterward, Trump defended his decision to meet with Kanye — a longtime supporter of his — by saying West “asked to see me for advice.” As open as West had been about his antisemitism at this point, it still wasn’t bad enough for Trump to cut ties with him.
It is likely, after the Jones interview, that West will become a full pariah. Praising Hitler is pretty much the one universally accepted cancelable offense.
But in doing so, West revealed what lurks behind the kind of rhetoric that mainstream conservatives are willing to employ and the sorts of forces they’re willing to ally themselves with when it’s deemed politically convenient. We know what some part of their audience hears when they blame “George Soros” for migrant caravans and rail against “globalist” plots against America.
Kanye West has bombed his career. The right’s plausible deniability is collateral damage.
It's a culture war. One side has antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny.
The Far Right Is Getting What It Asked For
With Ye on Infowars and Elon Musk lifting the floodgates on Twitter, the right wing is getting the free-speech thunderdome of its dreams. Or nightmares.
www.theatlantic.com
As Melissa Ryan, a progressive strategist who tracks the far right, told Semafor’s Dave Weigel earlier this week, Musk’s reinstating of banned right-wing accounts is “going to suck for Republicans … Some of these guys are going to go hog wild as soon as they can.”
Travis Brown, a researcher who has been tracking the reinstatement, has been struck by the rise in violent anti-Semitic rhetoric on the platform. “One thing that’s been remarkable to me is the sheer amount of blatant anti-Semitic stuff you can see,” he told me this week. “It’s much more on the surface recently. Click around in any of these Pepe avatar accounts and you will see jokes referencing 6 million cookies, which is a Holocaust reference.” Some of these accounts, Brown noted, have also thanked Musk for their reinstatement.
