White Supremacy and the Dearth of Ideas
My wife was watching a TV program that caught my attention as I was walking through the room. It was an episode of Madame Secretary in which one of the protagonists is embedded in a White Supremacist organization to disrupt a pending attack. I commented that the series was winding down and would likely be canceled soon.
She asked me what I meant by that and I explained my theory of Hollywood and White Supremacy; namely, that when the writers ran out of all possible woke storylines, they resort to a White Supremacy thread to stave off cancellation.
Admittedly, I do not have statistics to support this, but consider in your own entertainment choices the number of times you have seen homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, or any other contemporary cardinal sin woven into the storylines of your programming choices. Now, consider how many times the storyline involves good, decent people who are religiously observant. Then think back and consider how many times the story wends its way to a conflict with White Nationalists or Christian Fundamentalists.
Recently I was binging on an Amazon production called Bosch. It drew me in with its above-average writing and its setting in Hollywood, where I lived for many years. It was somehow comforting to see the neighborhoods where I lived and worked depicted with a small degree of fidelity. In the penultimate season, however, the imagination well ran dry and the storyline veered to the predictable. It featured a group of Posse Comitatus separatists who are squatting in homes they do not own while they stockpile weapons for the coming collapse.
There may indeed be White Supremacists, White Nationalists, Christian Identitarians, or other unsavory groups that progressive minds associate with the political right, but in my two decades of living in Hollywood, I never met any. I met Russian gangsters, Armenian gangsters, hookers and pimps of all stripes, MS13 gangsters, White Fence, independent criminals, and various other miscreants, but never the Central Casting Racist depicted in television or the movies.
Working on a tuna boat, or in an oil field, or on a construction site, I have never met the feared Neo-Nazi. Even working for eight years in the steel town of Fontana, California, the birthplace of the Hells Angels, I never met a White Supremacist. I have met many racists over the years, some black, some brown, some white, but I have never met any racist I would elevate to the level of “supremacist.”
And yet we are told they are everywhere, even in our own families, and, of course, in our government and our communities. Strangely, they are simultaneously ubiquitous and undetectable, so we need the media, Big Tech, and the federal government to expose and crush them. But who are they?
As of 2017, it turns out that they are us. Thanks to changed definitions, we are all part of the White Supremacist power structure. According to the Smithsonian Institutions’ National Museum of African American History and Culture, if you subscribe to traits such as individualism, empiricism, objective-linear thinking, and punctuality you are part of the White Supremacy power structure.
Other people insist that using grammatically correct language is a racist trait, as is the “worship of the written word.” They claim that discriminating in favor of those individuals who communicate well through spoken language or the written word is also part of the White Supremacist power structure. I suspect this is why we have descended from James Baldwin to Snoop Dog.
These are not traits that white babies are born with but that are withheld from black and brown babies. These are traits that are instilled through education and acculturation. Most of us do not believe that teaching our children to speak and write clearly, to be on time, and to think critically is a racist act and that we are creating another racist generation.
But what is the inevitable outcome of abandoning things like the Protestant work ethic, our reliance on empirical data, or our insistence on clear, concise communication? From the woke point of view, abandoning those values means a “great leveling” and more equitable outcome.
From an objective perspective, it means cultural and societal suicide. If everyone is equally ignorant and slothful nothing good can happen. I do not suggest that the proponents of Anti-Racism, such as Ibram Kendi and others, are ignorant or slothful. On the contrary, I believe they work extremely hard and know enough to be very harmful.
The entertainment industry and news media tell us that there are White Supremacist compounds scattered around the country with sleeper cells ready to activate in all our cities while our institutions of government and education insist that a great percentage of the population is irredeemably racist. Consider what former CIA director John Brennan has urged the Biden administration to focus on in its declared war against what they describe as domestic terrorists: “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
In the interests of full disclosure, I admit to being both a registered Libertarian and an observant Catholic. I am embarrassed to admit the former and feel no shame in the latter. But in a world of fluid definitions based on political expediency, we can all expect to be on the enemies of the state list. If insisting on grammatical English is a racist trait, you, dear reader, qualify for the list.
The reality we all know is that there are no racist insurgents plotting to overthrow the government. The Democratic leadership and the elite class are much like the Hollywood writers, out of ideas and bereft of imagination and creativity, hence the fabrication of a fictitious threat. This fabrication, however, is not like the Russian hoax. It is much more dangerous and can only further divide, and eventually radicalize both sides of the political and cultural divide. This cannot end well.
