Make (White, Male, Christian and Straight) America Great Again

 

     Let's get one thing straight- Whenever you hear some loudmouth bellow, "MAGA!" or "Make America Great Again!" or, God help us, "America First!", they're really talking about making themselves great again. Yeah, there are a lot of female MAGAts out there but the ones usually screaming the loudest about recapturing America's lost glory are white, straight, Christian males. 

     And if there's any one wedge that will irreparably split MAGA into two rump factions, it's anti-Semitism. And MAGA is having a simmering civil war over it.

      Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) invited Nick Shirley, the right-wing YouTuber who claimed to have found widespread fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs, and got two people killed and hundreds illegally arrested, as a result, to the State of the Union last week. One of Shirley’s fanboys, Tyler Oliveira, released a video that week in which he claimed, “I exposed New Jersey’s Jewish invasion."

     Immediately thereafter, Shirley (aka Baby Teeth), responded by saying, “EXPOSE IT ALL.”

     There are Old School MAGA factions who still stubbornly pretend to support Israel and all Jews (albeit with the cynical, unspoken dream of converting the last 144,000 to Christianity after Armageddon).

     Then there are those who are letting their anti-Semitism freak flag fly. Those consist of Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, the biggest mouths of the far right.

     When Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower nearly 11 years ago and began ragging on Mexicans, he gave the waiting and primed MAGA base a huge permission structure to hate not only Mexicans but anyone else they, and Trump, don't like. That quickly metastasized into anti-Semitism. Trump didn't create or radicalize these people. He knew they were already out there just waiting for his message of hatred and bigotry. He merely energized them.

     If you look throughout all of American history, back to the 18th century before the Know Nothings, you'll see that virtually every racial and religious demographic had been stigmatized. Native Americans, African Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Muslims, Jews, the Irish, Catholics, Germans, Italians, gays, transgenders. Even white American females, who had to wait 133 years after the Constitution was ratified for the right to vote. The list goes on. The only demographic that has not been seriously stigmatized has been white Christian males.

     Ever.

     Because they'd never allow themselves to be treated the way they treat those they hate. Of course, that doesn't stop some of them to hoarsely scream about "white genocide".

     It was white Christian males who formed the entirety of the KKK, which reached its peak about a century ago and even marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in huge numbers in 1925. Just 14 years later, the American Bund held a large rally in New York City under the protection of the NYPD.

     Yet, even as those large gatherings turned out to be the last big hurrah for both the KKK and the American Nazi Party, it wasn't their disgusting positions that brought them down but, in the case of the KKK, a woman's murder and, in the case of the American Bund, rampant corruption. Otherwise, we never disavowed their positions. After their seeming downfall, these factions merely went into hiding, recalibrated, softening their message. And they waited.

     Finally, their new savior came down an escalator, scowling down at them and they knew they found their man.

     David Duke, the former Grand Dragon of the KKK, almost immediately endorsed Trump in 2016 because he knew and recognized the dog whistle when he heard it. Rather than disavow Dukes' endorsement, Trump merely pretended not to know who he was because he didn't want to alienate his most reliable base. Later, he refused to blame American neo-Nazis after the deadly riot in Charlottesville. For all his polemics against countless people and organizations, Trump has never once come close to condemning anti-Semites and Neo Nazis.

     But many right wingers have always been anti-Semites and now they're trying to shoot a tranq into the Frankenstein they helped create. It started out by shambling. Now it's breaking into a sprint, pulling out the ineffectual darts.

     Right wing assclown Christopher Rufo is now taking it upon himself to sound the alarm about the anti-Semitism that's always been a feature, not a bug, of the far right. Which is a laugh, because Rufo was the one who started that despicable story about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating peoples' dogs and cats, a disgusting conspiracy theory that found its way on a presidential debate stage.

     And what these right wingers never realize is that, given the right time and opportunity, eventually, the rest of the base will come after them. It's inevitable. When you base your entire adult life on an ideology of hatred and throw in your lot with other like-minded people, they will start eating each other, betraying each other. We saw it in the bunker in the twilight of WWII.

     But out of all the prejudices that have infected the American mindset, the most durable is anti-Semitism.

     And then, there's Candace Owens. In her podcast Bride of Charlie just today, Owens said, "Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murder was likely a very sophisticated military operation that was meant, and here's the funny part, this is how insane these people are. Ironically, they wanted his murder to galvanize American support behind Israel. That was their plan."

     Owens is getting a lot of free lunches over Charlie Kirk's murder last September but if anyone will bring about that permanent rift between the Jew-hating and the Jew-tolerant MAGA factions, it'll be Owens. And when Owens inveighs against Israel, it's never through a Zionist lens but a simple-minded religious one.

     Then of course, there's avowed Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who wrote last week, "The conservative movement is falling out of love with Nick Shirley because he expressed support for Tyler Oliviera, who exposed fraud in the Jewish community. They actually believe that the rules just shouldn’t apply to Jewish people. The double standard couldn’t be clearer.”

     In other words, "How dare the right step on our God-given right to publicly hate on and lie about Jews?"

     But it really starts with Trump and his economy-sized permission structure to others to hate those he hates. Which is everyone not named Donald Trump. More than once, Trump slandered American Jews for not showing sufficient loyalty to him, which is part and parcel to the Nazi mindset. Starting even before his rise to power in 1933, Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that the Jews were to blame for Germany losing WWI. Like Trump nine decades after him, Hitler was savvy enough to know there were tens of millions across Germany who nursed a grudge over that and the tanking economy in the Weimar Republic and were casting about for a common villain. The Jews fit the bill, especially the bankers.

     But the so-called MAGA movement is in serious danger of not only splitting in two but splintering off until the entire movement becomes an irrelevant collection of cranks sniping at each other.

     And I have to think about that famous poem by Martin Niemöller: 

     First they came for the Communists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Communist      

     Then they came for the Socialists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Socialist      

     Then they came for the trade unionists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a trade unionist      

     Then they came for the Jews     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Jew      

     Then they came for me     

     And there was no one left     

     To speak out for me.

“Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murd ..

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/128957153.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

“Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murd ..

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/128957153.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst