Counterpunch Topic: "The Fourth Hypothesis: the Present Juncture of the Trump Clarification and the Watershed Moment on the Washington Mall" by Bill Martin

Bill Martin is a professor emeritus from DePaul U (philosophy), a musician, a socialist, and a very verbose guy; I doubt many would want to read his entire dissection of how the Covington Catholic schoolboys/Washington Square incident encapsulates most everything wrong with the identity politics left. However, I was greatly relieved to find this article because it validates everything I’d thought about the incident and its ramifications.

In the initial Youtube clip of the event, your typical liberal saw an “iconic” image right up there with that 1972 Life magazine cover of the napalmed, naked Vietnamese girl running away from US soldiers. The locking of eyes between a 16-year old boy wearing a MAGA hat and a small, old American Indian beating a drum told them all we need to know about the deplorable privileged white male “sneering” at the oppressed but wise “other.” National media pigs grabbed this shiny bauble – the very essence of pure good and pure evil of our time – and ran with it. Then more video was placed on YouTube and most media pigs, who’d been gleefully demonizing a 16-year-old boy for smiling and wearing a MAGA hat, retracted.

But this one young journalist, Laura Wagner, could not let go of the perfectness of the image, which so totally explained her liberal, academically-trained identity politics view of the world. In an article entitled “Don't Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” she stuck to her guns. Of journalists who saw the larger picture, she sneered that they “were all too happy to say that the sky was not blue if it meant burnishing their credentials as serious and objective, and fell over each other to back away from what was right in front of their eyes.” Wagner felt that those who disagreed with her were, essentially, supporting the patriarchy and victimizing the truly awake, like herself.  https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/dont-doubt-what-you-saw-with-your-own-eyes-1831931203

Well, I was feeling sickly this past week so to distract myself I watched a lot of YouTube of the incident, and wrote a post four days ago in response to your typical liberal who saw things just like Wagner (who is the journalist I’m referring to below).

What I’m wondering about is the implications of the boys still getting all the media attention, even after more video came out. The one who dared smile (!!!!!!) when confronted by a strange man beating a drum in his face had his name exposed, received death threats, and was roundly condemned in the national media, while the names of the Black Israelites, who clearly started the confrontation, have never been mentioned. Doesn’t that seem strange? In accounts that want to condemn the boys they’re briefly mentioned as having said some bad things.

Right, for over an hour and a half those guys were bellowing hate speech at everyone on the square, yet it was painted as a confrontation instigated by some schoolboys. One absurd fool of a journalist wrote that the Black Israelites were “a threat to women in their orbit, but not to random white people they’re heckling.” Right. So children should expect to have grown men spew hate speech at them; no big deal? This is identity politics at its worst. And it’s racist, but not in the way you might think. It is racist against black people, because it implies that grown black men can’t be held responsible for their speech acts, no matter how perverted and noxious.

You say, “The racism of the Black Hebrews is out there in your face and obvious. The thing is they have no power." What do you think that means?" I think it means you think screaming racist rants is OK if you’re black. I think that attitude breeds racism against blacks. I think it means you’re trying to make a class and race issue out of something that’s much simpler: simple lack of common decency.

I don’t know about you, but if I were 16 and some adults were shouting at my group that we’re “dirty animals,” “filthy ass crackers,” “faggots,” prodigy of incest, etc, and denigrating my religion, I don’t know what I’d do. It seemed pretty reasonable for the group to just start chanting school songs to drown those men out, and to laugh at the aggression, which is what they did. It was quite the spectacle, and yet the media pigs paint the BOYS as out of control. How, exactly, were they out of control? Where they yelling obscenities back? No. One guy took his shirt off, and they were singing, and some were even clapping to the drums and – gasp! – making little chopping gestures – wow, how out of control! Did they threaten anybody, as the Black Israeli’s did? I guess they should have just meekly abided the abuse while waiting for their bus?

If in the midst of this some American Indian came right up into my face beating a drum, I wouldn’t have known how to react. It was a very surreal scene, yet somehow the media expected the boy should have realized that the Indians were “clearly” trying to diffuse the situation. Um, how does that follow?

That’s what I saw. All other people saw were some MAGA hats, so those kids must be awful, scary racists. Deplorables! This idiotic journalist describes them as “visibly aggressive teens, who were draped in the symbols of white nationalism and misogyny.” And there’s much made of them being from a “pricey” school, but if you look it up, you’ll find it’s the least expensive Catholic prep school in Kentucky – these are not the sons of CEOs and senators. Yet these liberal identity politickers swear they saw “sneering young white men [MEN?]…frenzied and yelling and out of control.”

Basically, the clip of this scenario that first came out was tailor made for liberals to virtue signal their allegiance to hating white males in those scary, scary hats and to go into TDS hysteria. Even after the reality of the situation came out, they stuck to their preferred narrative. What foolishness.</blockquote>

I’d been trying to write an email to my friend Paul about my total frustration with what Martin calls the IdPol left, or Identity Politics left, when I found this article, so I'll let him say it for me. I agree with Martin that the left has to get back to its Marxist roots and be WITH the working classes, despite their imperfections, and to stop trying to cling to the delusion that the Democrats have any interest in doing so; and to realize that despite their good intentions, they are feeding into the desires of global capitalism. With Martin, I agree that the Yellow Vests are leading the way, if the US left would only consider it; and am deeply disturbed by the fact that “there was a time when people protested the war on the people of Vietnam; now they protest the nervous smile of a teenager.” I also agree that Leonard Pitts, Jr of the Miami Herald was truly full of shit, shit characteristic of the IdPol media, when he wrote this:

Indeed, what gave the image its initial, visceral power was the sense that [Nicholas Sandmannn’s] expression was one we have seen before. It was on the face of an SS man as he cut off a rabbi’s beard on a Warsaw street, on the face of an Alabama state trooper waiting at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Heck, it was on the face of a hulking high school boy as he prepared to dunk a smaller kid’s head into the toilet. It was the eternal expression of the bully at the head of a mob. … 

And, as Martin nails it, “One element of real racism here is that black people, like this commentator and like the “African-American folks” known as the Black Hebrews, can’t be called out as being just as capable of being full of shit as anyone else on this planet.

There’s a lot in this long essay worth discussing, and I wanted to excerpt from it but my list of quotes got very, very long, so I’ll just excerpt Martin's "part one":

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1) All you’ve got is hate: The theodicy of Identity Politics versus the smile of a white, male, teenager.

Again a message to my liberal and left friends (that is, Democrats and those to the left—progressives, liberal feminists, Identity Politics people, etc.): Everything you do not want to face about what the Lib-Left has become is concentrated in the Washington Mall incident.

The horrible attacks on a smiling male teenager, Nicholas Sandmannn, speak to the essence of the Left now—that it has no ideas, that it has subordinated itself completely to anti-universalist and anti-working class Identity Politics, that its “methods” are snark, name-calling, the crude neo-positivism of throwing out a “fact” or two (joined with the inability to analyze or even read), arrogant and superior attitudes toward “ordinary people,” creating/falling for stunts, doubling down on judgments that were ridiculous to begin with, and now simply nothing more than pure, self-righteous hatred, and the accompanying vitriol.

What were the sources of the hatred and vitriol that was hurled with self-righteous fury at Nicholas Sandmann?  Here is a list of answers to this question, not all of them applying to each and every liberal/leftist, and with some overlap, but generally descriptive of how such a despicable mob of haters has collectively aggregated itself—through, of course, the relatively safe-haven (for them) of social media cyber-bullying.

1) An Identity Politics that is always ready to condemn a white male out of hand, even a kid, a teenager, a young person.

2) An Identity Politics that is ready to believe the most noxious, reactionary crap, as long as it is said by a woman and/or person of color.

3) An Identity Politics for whom class exists only as a marker of being expendable and deplorable.

4) Fearful and cowardly virtue-signaling especially on the part of adult, middle-class, white males, often “professionals” and academics, who want to be quick to assure those around them that they aren’t like those deplorables.

5) A State Feminism (of the sort seen in Title IX institutions in universities) that holds that all maleness is “toxic masculinity”—or could become such at any moment—that must be curtailed, punished, destroyed.

6) The erroneous view, self-serving for the left, that Trump is a fascist (a Nazi, or “even worse than Hitler,” some are saying), and therefore the MAGA hat is equivalent to the swastika or the KKK’s white hood—and therefore it is right and necessary that those who display these symbols should be condemned, their houses and schools burned down, physically assaulted, or even killed (one suggestion, from a producer at Disney, was to run Nick Sandmann through a woodchipper).

7) The “idea” that it doesn’t really matter whether some white male is “guilty” of what is being said of him, or it doesn’t matter how small the “crime” is, if there is something to point to—a supposed smirk, something about posture, wearing a hat representing the elected president; what matters is that any white male is already guilty—of being born, essentially.

8) The related “idea” that, whether “guilty” (of a smirk) or not, it really doesn’t matter what happens to this or that white male (no matter how young), or all of them, for that matter; this opens the door to what may as well be called the “Herod solution.”

9) The also related “idea”—and this is Identity Politics in its essence—that we cannot talk about Nick Sandmann in universalist terms, as a “human being.”

10 ) The related, racist “idea”—which again is Identity Politics—that a person-of-color, a Black Hebrew Israelite or a Native American, somehow cannot be as full of crap as any other human being can be; here we might remember that Jehovah’s angels can only do good, and also that (Biblically-speaking) they do not agency—in other words, these so-called “African-American folks” (as some put it in reports of the incident, not taking a single second to determine who these “folks” are), in the theology/theodicy of Identity Politics, have no agency.

11) The also racist idea that people-of-color ought to automatically escape all scrutiny as to what they are really up to, what they actually say or claim, who they are connected to; this “idea” is the “race” version of the sexist idea expressed in “I believe her” –in other words, there are no standards or principles of ethics or politics or character, there are only “identities”; this has the (probably unintended) effect of treating women and people-of-color as simultaneously enlightened oracles and as lesser animals acting out of instinct.

12) The “idea” that people cannot be understood as belonging to any universal category, and that there cannot be universal principles, but that, at the same time, a hierarchy can be established among identities; this hierarchy then supposedly explains how everything social can be understood in terms of identity, but some identities do not count; in other words, this is the previously-empowered identity hierarchy flipped over.

13) The problem (or contradiction) in the previous schema that is not addressed by just saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” or even that the simple, “dialectical inversion” or “overturning” of the pre-existing power schema only leads to the mirror-image of that schema, at most: the problem is that there is nothing truly political here, there is only a mechanics (and a very crude mechanics at that) of power; this Identity Politics can never serve the vast majority of people, and will not even serve the majority of people specified within any given Identity group (whether previously treated as “other” or not).

14) Lastly, the “simple idea” that anything that serves to discredit Trump, whether based on anything true or “solid” (e.g., something more than an identity-based perspective on how a facial configuration is to be understood), is fine, and any harm that is done to individuals in the pursuit or wake of this effort, is justified. The justification is that Trump is and/or represents an existential threat to the world—one might even say “humanity,” if there was such a thing—and nothing so quaint and outdated as basic decency toward a human being (of course, there are no human beings here, and we’re dealing with a deplorable-by-birth here, a white male) or backing up for a moment and trying to understand and not being merely reactive should stand in anyone’s way—this is an emergency situation!

15) So, I can’t resist, nor should I: it can be added to (14) that the “hate-work” of this anti-Trump “resistance” has the “positive” outcome for the resisters of allowing them to puff themselves up with self-satisfaction and self-righteousness, and with a kind of certitude that one would think would be reserved for some truly revolutionary emergence or flowering of a new truth upon the scene. But, of course, a new truth is not only quite obviously not a part of the Lib-Left agenda, they themselves are quite clear on not wanting anything of that sort. They are beyond being anti-revolutionary, they are rabid in their rhetoric and other efforts toward getting back to the stable status quo of the establishment.  An extra-bonus for the white middle-class professional and academic males who are rushing to be a part of this ridiculous and horrible mob of hate-mongers, is that their militant virtue-signaling represents a truly toxic masculinity, added to the already obnoxious self-righteousness of the ridiculous, LARPing, social media anti-Trump movement.

In other words, taking off from these last two points (14/15), Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is real.  TDS has made a great many Democrats and leftists into messed-up people—apparently too messed-up to see how being consumed with hate has rendered them unable to think.  These people may think they are justified in their hate and hateful rhetoric, but they cannot (and likely do not) deny their hate.  But hate is poisonous.

Thinking through this, I can see now why some of my friends have responded to my articles on the Trump Clarification by saying that I’ve always hated liberals.  I do not now, nor have I ever “hated” liberals.  I’m not a hater, and I find it hard to even hate the most despicable people, at least those among the living, whether they be Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton. I have my limits, but, at the same time, I do not think hate is helpful in matters of real politics, or in fighting against anti-politics, even beyond the poisonous role that hate can play for being able to think to begin with.

None of this means anything to liberals and leftists who now revel in hate and take pleasure in it.  Perhaps some reading this, if they are not connected to social media, will think that I am exaggerating.  Anyone who followed Facebook in the days after Friday, January 18 will know very well what I am talking about.  I do not want to repeat here all of the ugly things that were said about Nick Sandmann, though an expression such as “sniveling little shit” would be somewhere in the medium range of the vitriol—but what especially stood out was that many were really enjoying hurling such epithets.  All that is par for the course for Facebook, where you can be called an idiot or worse for thinking Led Zeppelin III is better than Led Zeppelin II, but it hardly vindicates the Left to say that they are operating on this same level these days.

(And yes, to satisfy the limited logic of Democrats and those who think we have to support Democrats at the national level no matter what, I do think Dick Cheney is several levels of despicable beyond Hillary Clinton—but that is several levels beyond a line that HRC is on the same side of.)

What the Left has in fact “achieved” is a situation where the previous exaggerations and dystopian fantasies of right-wingers have been brought to life.  What were previously absurd or at least highly-exaggerated characterizations such as “feminazi” and “anti-white racism” are now realities.  It’s almost as if the Left, and liberal feminists and race-oriented activists said, “You think we’ve got these things? We’ll show you!”  If this was about more than power, it would be hard to blame these identity-oriented activists, and I will credit at least some of them with thinking that it is about more than power, at least in the beginning—but now the rhetoric of this IdPol trend, and its ways of working and its associations with people such as the Clintons and with the electoral system generally, gives the lie to this in more recent years.

Regarding “anti-white racism,” for many decades, along with people who were more representative of the Left of the Sixties, as opposed to the IdPol Left, I have been skeptical of the idea of “reverse racism.”  I remain skeptical.  If the only time a white person in U.S. society thinks about racism is in the narrow terms of when it seems to affect him or her personally and negatively, and otherwise has no interest in the question, that isn’t “reverse racism,” it’s simply a manifestation of white racism.  Furthermore, there has to be more to understanding a situation where a white person feels aggrieved when some question of race is involved than a trite “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Anti-white racism”—is it really “racism”?  Probably not; it’s IdPol stigmatization and condemnation, though, and it is not good and nothing good will come of it for anyone.

The IdPol-motivated people who made these attacks in various forms of media and social media, when presented with a different narrative than the one they are all too comfortable with, doubled down on their ridiculous and hateful claims, and now, in recent days, they’ve moved on to something else, with nary a thought to the tremendous damage they have done.

No doubt the same people will give no thought to the arguments I am making here—because, after all, these arguments make things complicated, when in reality everything today can be understood so simply: Trump is a fascist, you (whoever) are not jumping on the bandwagon to condemn Trump, therefore you are a fascist, racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, and an idiot, to boot. This is the “simple” theodicy of Identity Politics; in its supposed secularity, and for its target audience, it has far more appeal than any of the great world religions,

Robyn Urback of the CBC News wrote that the way she and others “jumped the gun” in a rush to judgment of Nick Sandmann and the Covington students “ought to be one hell of a wake-up call” (cbc.ca, 1.21.19, 5:20pm).  The haters however, were already too woke to hear this call.  As Urback writes, clarification of the real situation “might as well have never come”; “The contextless narrative had already been repeated by media outlets across the globe, and the school had already issued a statement and announced it was considering expulsion.”  (School administrations these days stand ever-ready to cravenly cave to the IdPol Left.)  To her credit, Urback’s wrote this article very quickly, just a few days after the incident—and yet she still asserted that “The students’ behaviour was incredibly disrespectful, of course, which those who have been blindly defending the teens ought to acknowledge.”  No—she remains too blind and needs to dig deeper.

Still, good on this honest person.

Unfortunately, such people either in the MSM or on social media are few and far between.  In fact, the reaction of the haters has been to accuse anyone who says that we need to look again and think again of “gaslighting.”  This goes to the combination of points (7) and (8) above and the idea that it’s all very simple and cut-and-dried: it doesn’t matter what happens to any individual in the momentous resistance struggleof the anti-Trumpers (who so bravely put themselves on the line on social media every day!) and, in this great struggle for IdPol justice there cannot be any second thoughts, further investigation, etc.—in fact, there cannot be any thinking or investigation, period, that just gets in the way.  So, it’s just a matter of the right word for dismissing any movement toward thinking and investigation—in this case, the word is gaslightling.  Of course, then you can have a few more epithets thrown in for good measure, “fascist,” “racist,” etc.

It is fascinating, though, that in the wake of the MSM/IdPol-Left narrative on the Nathan Phillips/Nicholas Sandmann encounter, apparently a significant part of the BuzzFeed and HuffPost teams of “journalists” have been fired.  Obviously, they are redundant if they do no investigation and only follow their IdPol-Left motivations in what they piece together from the MSM for their own “journalism.”  Maybe they thought “journalism” is supposed to be like the journaling they did for classes in college.

Meanwhile, people recommending that these fired “journalists” “Learn to Code!” have now been deemed to have engaged in offensive behavior by Twitter, despite the fact that HuffPost itself had an article titled, “What we need to encourage girls to learn how to code” a couple years ago (10.6.17).

How did things go from “All you need is love” to “All you’ve got is hate”?

How did things go from “The people united will never be defeated” to “The establishment united will never be defeated”?

At the very moment (speaking in terms of a historical moment) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced that U.S. citizens should be concerned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, that embryonic complex went into high-gear to insure that it would do nothing but grow and spread and dominate from that moment on.

At the very moment when candidate Donald J. Trump announced his intention to “drain the swamp,” that same swamp of the bought-and-paid-for political class (and its retinue of lobbyists, consultants, etc.) went into feverish activity to not only maintain its status but to extend it.

Every element of the establishment is fighting against Trump, either frontally or through subterfuge, with the White House minders now taking full or very close to full control.  The latter is what is pushing the recent actions on Venezuela, I am guessing, not only as a way to further attack a country that was abused throughout the previous two administrations (and with the great majority of Democrats on board with the recent actions), but also (and perhaps more significantly) to push Trump off of his generally interventionist stance. This stance is so unpopular with the establishment, that Trump has to put his message out there on Twitter, from the time of night and in the place where he might have some privacy.  Then your average liberal criticizes Trump for how he does things.

This is a wonderful moment for the establishment, when it can all get together on one goal, and have the neocons on board with the neoliberals, and the IdPol Left cheering them on.

And it’s a terrible moment for the rest of humanity; what better symbol of this than hatefully beating up on a smiling teenager just because he stood where he was already standing, waiting on a bus back to a small town in Kentucky?

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Read it all at https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/20/the-fourth-hypothesis-the-present-juncture-of-the-trump-clarification-and-the-watershed-moment-on-the-washington-mall/