In case anyone
still needs confirmation, the rage and frenzy surrounding the supposed standoff
caught on video last week between Covington Catholic High School students and an
anti-Catholic, Native American activist demonstrates as nothing else has lately
that the political left’s primary aim, the end game of identity politics, is the
demonization of white Christian men.
Covington student
Nicholas Sandmann (pictured above) was the unfortunate epicenter of this
tempest-in-a-teapot concocted entirely by the activist media, in which he and
his classmates were falsely portrayed as racist bullies surrounding and
taunting a frail Native American “elder,” Nathan Phillips. The truth – that it
was the schoolboys who were verbally assaulted by Black Hebrew Israelite activists, and
that Sandmann did and said nothing but stand his ground and smile in the face
of Phillips’ provocation – swiftly came to light, but not before the entire
country had squared off over the lie.
It wasn’t that the
news media got the story wrong, which would imply that they made a mistake, but
that they didn’t care about getting it right. They didn’t care, because
they saw an opportunity to dehumanize a white male wearing that triggering symbol
of white supremacy, the “Make America Great Again” cap, and decided to run with
a narrative that could be weaponized against President Trump and his “angry
white male” supporters. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and
polarize it,” master strategist Saul Alinsky once taught, and Catholic white
boy Sandmann became the left’s target of the moment.
Some media outlets
gradually and quietly backed off from their original rush to judgment as more
video and context emerged, but the damage was done, the political divide
between Americans was widened, and the more fervent leftists clung to their bigoted
view that Sandmann represents the toxic, Christian white male underbelly of an
America that bears racism in its very DNA, as Barack
Obama once declared.
Sandmann is the
left’s new Kavanaugh. On Twitter, BuzzFeed senior culture correspondent Anne
Helen Petersen made that connection explicit by pairing Sandmann’s photo with
one of Justice Kavanaugh’s smiling face and called their expressions “the look
of white patriarchy.” Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania
associate professor in education, tweeted that Sandmann
represents “the smiling face of whiteness.” So “Smiling While White” is now
essentially a hate crime. In fact, Smiling While White is not even considered a
smile; it’s a “smirk,” and smirking is now seen as something only whites do.
Has no one ever seen Barack Obama’s face?
Last month
Democrat Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono grilled Trump judicial nominee
Brian Buescher over his membership in the Catholic fraternal organization, the
Knights of Columbus. Both hard-left Senators referred to the KoC’s “extreme
positions” and Harris complained that it was an “all-male” institution –
because any Christian-based institution that is all-male must be a
hotbed of rapey patriarchs. Last week, Dan Levin, a reporter from the New
York Times, went on Twitter with the hashtag “ExposeChristianSchools”
digging for dirt on Christian educators. The day after his confrontation with
Covington Catholic students, Nathan Phillips and his drum-and-chant ensemble,
who demand reparations from the Catholic Church for indigenous peoples, tried
to disrupt a Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate
Conception in Washington D.C.
What all this comes
down to is identity politics, the Marxist-inspired ideology of
divide-and-conquer. It shrewdly posits that the dynamics of Western society can
be reduced simply to the conflict between oppressor and oppressed, and thus the
most effective way to resist and ultimately overcome the oppressor is to define
and categorize people not by their individual character but collectively by the
immutabilities of race and sex. In America as well as elsewhere in the Western
world, the oppressor is seen as the Christian white male, and all other
identities belong to one or more categories of the oppressed. The end game is
not unity of the body politic, not e pluribus unum, but the overthrow of
the oppressor.
In this worldview,
if you are, say, black, then you are defined as an oppressed class regardless
of what you think and believe, regardless of your economic stratum, regardless
of your life experience. If you are a black who resents being lumped in with
other blacks simply because of your skin color, and you resist the expectation to
consider yourself a victim of white supremacy, then in the view of identity
politics you aren’t really black. You are ostracized as a race traitor.
Likewise for members of other designated victim groups.
But for all the
left’s obsession with victims, the demographic facing far-and-away the most
open bigotry today is the oppressor class, white Christian men. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the indoctrination mills of our universities, where entire
Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies departments extol the righteous victimhood
of the oppressed classes, alongside proliferating programs on “deconstructing
whiteness” and “toxic masculinity.” In response to the Covington controversy,
Kevin Allred, a white educator who teaches a course in “Politicizing Beyoncé,” tweeted
that “white people really are terrorists. whiteness is terrorism.” Substitute
"blackness," "Jewishness," or "Muslims" for
"white people" in that tweet and there would be a flood of hate
speech accusations and a Twitter ban. But because the left has made it
culturally acceptable to spew hatred at whites, Allred will face no
consequences. Whites who object to this are dismissed by the left as whining
snowflakes who, as the oppressor class, deserve all the hatred aimed at them –
proving the point that blatant anti-white bigotry is acceptable.
None of this is
new. Western civilization and the Christian white males with whom it is
identified have been targeted increasingly for decades in the name of diversity
and multiculturalism (recall Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1980s leading Stanford
protesters in the chant, “Hey ho, hey ho, Western Civ has got to go”?). As far
back as twenty years ago, David Horowitz published a collection of essays
called Hating
Whitey about this dangerous phenomenon and its “growth industry”
of anti-white activists and academics. Getting from hating whitey to
literally exterminating whitey may be a bridge too far, but dismantling
the purported white power structure by dehumanizing white males, inculcating a
deep sense of guilt and self-hatred in them, and squeezing them out of
positions of authority and influence is manageable and already underway.
Especially with
the onset of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the left has ramped up this offensive
against the Christian white male “oppressors” such as 16-year-old Nicholas
Sandmann who stand in the way of their “inclusive” Marxist utopia. And like
Sandmann, we must stand our ground.
From FrontPage Mag, 1/27/19
