Identify the bogus argument — and you will have exposed the frauds who want you to send them to live off the fleshpots in Rome-on-the-Potomac. (Actually, as one wag perspicaciously pointed out, “Not a fair comparison to Rome, which, after all, built two great civilizations and is a site of enormous cultural significance.”)
Although not exclusive to him, my example today comes from Fox News’s Jesse Watters. When speaking loudly over his guest — why invite them on, if you intend to drown them out? — Mr. Watters made the usual Republican straw argument against black crime. You hear it routinely from Hannity, Owens and the rest:
Democrats “only care when a white person takes a black life. If a black person takes a black life, they don’t even care at all.”
Likewise, it can be said that Republican don’t much care when a black person takes a white life.
Seldom mentioned in Republican argumentation is the real hate crime in the room: black-on-white crime which is invariably not reported, underreported, or if reported, masked as something other than what it really is.
Republicans just can’t seem to protect or stick up for besieged whites and are forever searching their brains for ways to show off their Abe Lincoln pedigree.
“Democrats are the real racists” has become a popular, mocking meme. Having originated it back in 2014, I’d argue that the line, “Democrats don’t care that blacks are killing blacks,” is a species of the “Democrats are the real racists,” black-centric fatuity.
In this way, by showing how black-focused and caring they are — Republicans hang on to institutional respectability, and on to the good graces of the Dominatrix Party by the hairs of their chinny chin-chins. The empty “arguments” of Republican frontmen are a way to stay in the political game.
The latest in this political genre comes courtesy of J.D. Vance, who had shunned Trump, but has recently found religion on the president’s populism:
“I don’t care if we are talking about a little black girl in 1965, or a little white girl in 2021, telling a little girl that she is evil because of her skin color is disgusting and vile,” Vance thundered at a conference on national conservatism.
And what is my objection to what Vance said, you ask? It is very plainly this: It is not 1965! And most of the victims of hate crimes are white, not black.
For Republicans, however, it is impossible to mention white suffering without dragging in the “black experience.”
Again was this vintage Republican habit — using weasel words to preen politically and sound fair and impartial — on display in the Kyle Rittenhouse affair.
Even though Republicans assured us the Rittenhouse case was “not about race,” their quicksilver political instincts kicked in, telling them to reflexively bring in the “black experience.”
Republican Dana Loesch thus proved incapable of defending white Kyle on Fox News, without inserting the blandest of bromides about “black businesses” being burned in Kenosha during BLM riots, on that day.
Wearily familiar, then, was the substance of Ms. Loesch’s tweet, which was echoed on Fox News to Watters, Nov. 15, as she called for, “Justice for the black business owners whose businesses were burned to the ground by people like white convicted pedophile and racist Joseph Rosenbaum screaming slurs on camera or white domestic abuser Anthony Huber, or white Antifa member Grosskruetz brandishing a handgun?”
In Republican vernacular, white kid Kyle just doesn’t cut it as a cause absent the moral padding of the “black experience.”
WATCH: “Republicans’ Main Focus: Showing Off How Black-Focused They Are”:
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new Podcast