Extremism Goes Mainstream
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It is not as if we had no extremists in the country before Donald Trump became president. I can remember even as a teenager seeing newspapers spreading unfounded stories about politicians and celebrities and exposés about Catholics, Jews, and secret societies that controlled the world. But, for the most part, these were eccentric publications, far out of the mainstream, with an air of zealotry about them, usually found around college campuses or being handed out by wild-eyed people who were hard to take seriously. Black Muslims, the supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, and various Aryan supremacist groups come to mind.
Times have changed. Every morning when I turn on my computer, it opens to Yahoo’s homepage, where you will find article after article making charges without any evidence to back them up. In some cases, these articles are opinion pieces, by authors who make no claim to objectivity. Nothing to object to there.
But in other cases the articles are outright lies, defamations of character, masquerading as news, what they call “fake news” these days. They come from sources on both the left and the right. For example, I have seen stories alleging that Hillary Clinton ran a sex ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C., and pictures photo-shopped to make it look as if Donald Trump’s parents were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Because they appear on the Internet, rather than in some amateurish newspaper, they come across as respectable and serious-minded. People read them and then repeat what they have read, inserting the false information into the marketplace of ideas around the water cooler or over the back fence. It is hard not to conclude that the purveyors of the lies count on that to happen; that they know their lie eventually will be discovered, but only after it has become a talking point that shapes public opinion.
I’ll give you an example. The very day after President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, a story about Gorsuch popped up all over the Internet. I became aware of it because someone pointed out to me a posting on Facebook by a woman who prides herself on being an advocate for what she calls “progressive causes.” She called upon friends and relatives to launch a letter-writing campaign “to stop Trump from getting away with this outrage.”
The “outrage” was found in an article that quoted from a speech made by Gorsuch in 2012. It read: “Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races. This goal must include freeing of the American media and government from subservient Jewish interests.”
The woman who posted this on Facebook believed that these were Gorsuch’s words. The problem is that the statement actually came from former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke. The website snopes.com verified that the words are Duke’s: “In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Duke made the statement in 1998 and featured the same excerpt, though the SPLC did not specify whether it came from the same op-ed or from a different written piece or speech.”
Snopes concluded, “There is no record of Gorsuch supporting segregation or anti-Semitic causes.”
Case closed? You might think so. When the woman who posted this story about Gorsuch on Facebook became aware that Snopes had discredited it, she wrote, “Sorry. I take back this slur. It is unkind. Gorsuch did not write those words. The article used someone else’s words. I fell into the trap, because Gorsuch stands for everything I find regressive.”
Fair enough; as far as it goes. The woman tried to set the record straight. But let us wait for a few weeks, and count how many times we hear people make comments about Gorsuch being a segregationist and an anti-Semite. My guess it will not be infrequently. You can’t unring the bell.
Who was responsible for the original story about Gorsuch? It is attributed to someone who identifies himself as MakAusGr8Again. Some are making the case that this is the Internet name for a website maintained by an Australian racist who supports Trump; and that he spread the story deliberately in the hope that individuals opposed to Trump would circulate it and make fools of themselves.
That could be true. I checked the website and it is filled with vulgar racist comments about Third Worlders. But that is irrelevant. Even if this story about Gorsuch was intended as a hoax to make those opposed to Trump look as if they are motivated by an irrational hate of the man — it worked. Leftists opposed to Trump latched onto the story and spread it around the Internet. They believed it was true, revealing their contempt for Trump and those who voted for him.
Their reaction to this story about Gorsuch illustrates why so many have taken to the streets in violent protests against Trump, why they are willing to employ labels such as racist, sexist, xenophobe, and homophobe to those who disagree with them.
Their behavior is what led Dennis Prager in a recent column to use the term “second Civil War” to describe the period we are in. Many on the right have been calling upon those opposed to Trump to act civilly, to behave as the “loyal opposition,” pointing out that conservatives did not riot when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were elected, even though disappointment on the right was great at the time.
Prager says it won’t work; that it is unrealistic to hope for such a return to normal political discourse. He doubts if there is enough in common between Americans with traditional values and the anti-Trump militants for such civility to take shape.
He asks how is it possible to work for the common good with “left-wing nihilists” who hold “America’s values” in contempt, who tell us that Shakespeare and Bach are nothing more than “dead white European males and therefore racist,” who “regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral,” who “repeatedly tell America and its black minority” that “the greatest problems afflicting black America” are the results of “white privilege,” who think that “the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic,” who hold that “Israel is the villain in the Middle East” and claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an “expression of religious bigotry,” and make “slave-owner” the “defining characteristic of the Founding Fathers?”
If Prager is correct — and he sounds persuasive — it is not just Trump’s election that is causing the outburst of anger on the left. The protests are against more than his policies. They are against the traditional Americans who elected him. That is why Prager calls it a second Civil War and why, he argues, the correct strategy for Americans on the right is not to seek “bipartisanship” with the left but its “defeat.”
Considering the Republican Party’s current hold over the White House and both houses of Congress, there may never again be a better moment for American conservatives to shape that strategy.
