{"id":82184,"date":"2022-05-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82184"},"modified":"2022-05-19T12:27:28","modified_gmt":"2022-05-19T17:27:28","slug":"tailgunner-joe-rides-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82184","title":{"rendered":"Tailgunner Joe Rides Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>&#8220;Are you now or have you ever been a &#8216;white supremacist&#8217;?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The spirit of Tailgunner Joe lives on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2022\/05\/16\/white-americans-speak-against-great-replacement-theory\/?fbclid=IwAR1gdz5WXiYV99dEms00lhKQ4m6xZ5-RiWIBa6lo8u_dG5vCEINGSPNY1d4\">This article came out the other day<\/a>, demanding that white people &#8220;speak out against White Supremacy&#8221;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>OK.  White Supremacy sucks.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>There are indeed &#8220;white supremacists&#8221; out there. Like all racial supremacists &#8211; Nazis, Hutu, HAMAS, the Japanese of the 1930s &#8211; they believe something that is deeply, intensely evil. Every rational person of all races has condemned them for over a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the objective record shows that that condemnation has had an effect. The number of people in &#8220;white supremacist&#8221; groups has been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude every generation. In the 1920s, there were several million members; the Klan drew 50K to a rally in <em>Rochester, MN<\/em>. In the 1940s, the American neo-Nazi &#8220;Bund&#8221; party filled a couple nights at Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the time of the Civil Rights movement, membership had dropped to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands; by the 80s and 90s, a few tens of thousands (some of whom were exceptionally militant). According to the FBI, organized white supremacist groups mustered under 5,000 members in the 2010s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1988, a Gallup poll showed that 1\/3 of black Americans believed racism was to one degree or another a powerful force. In 1992, William Raspberry, a man who grew up under Jim Crow in Mississippi, covered the Civil Rights movement, and became the first black national syndicated news columnist, wrote a column (that, coming out as it did juuust before everything in the world got put online, has proven to be impossible to unearth) that racism wasn&#8217;t <em>dead<\/em>, per se, but was the province of the stupid and ignorant, and should be mocked and taunted, akin to the moral flat earthers they were. [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suddenly, in the late 2000s, after the election of the first black president, the political class discovered racism again. The Obama Administration spent its entire time in office warning that a &#8220;white supremacist wave of terror that would dwarf 9\/11&#8221; was on the way, yessirreebob. Obama&#8217;s handling of several police shooting incidents in the early 2010s could have hardly been better designed to stoke racial division &#8211; it&#8217;s what the approach was designed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By 2015, that same Gallup poll showed 2\/3 of black Americans felt racism was a dominant fact in their lives &#8211; doubling in 27 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Did America get <em>more<\/em> racist between the LA riots and the election of Barack Obama?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More on point &#8211; did more racists fall out of the trees in 2017? Or is it suddenly in the interest of the political class&#8217;s narrative to not only focus on a tiny class of deviants, but to try to create more of them, so they could have a boogieman to wave around to scare the ignorant into line?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is there a story that our political class&#8217;s dominant narrative doesn&#8217;t try to squeeze a &#8220;white supremacist&#8221; into? Governor Klink and Mayor Frey and the Strib all preposterously blamed &#8220;white supremacists&#8221; for the rioting after the murder of George Floyd; the Strib fingered the infamous &#8220;Umbrella Man&#8221; &#8211; who disappeared without a trace. MPR reporter Jon Collins famously sent out a tweet asking &#8211; fairly begging &#8211; for any evidence of white supremacist involvement in the riots; his record of stories over the past two years shows no follow-up on that tweet (Collins has ignored questions &#8211; as, indeed, all MPR reporters do, these days. It&#8217;s official policy. I have the email). Several government &#8220;stings&#8221; of &#8220;white supremacist terrorists&#8221; (remember the &#8220;Hutaree&#8221;? The &#8220;plot&#8221; to &#8220;kidnap&#8221; Governor Whitmer?) came and, when shown to have been government shake and bake operations, went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And today &#8211; after a retrograde idiot shot ten people (whom, he gleefully noted in his manifesto, could not effectively resist him, due to New York gun control laws), the WaPo op-ed writer Michelle Norris says all white people are accountable for &#8220;white supremacy&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, when people like Norris say white people should &#8220;speak out&#8221; against something, they don&#8217;t want speaking out; they want silent acquiescence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you read the article &#8211; I did so you don&#8217;t have to, but go for it anyway &#8211; she harps on the notion that the shooter was driven by fear of the &#8220;Great Replacement Theory&#8221;, or GRT. GRT, Norris notes, is the idea that white conservatives believe that there&#8217;s a plan to replace white voters with voters &#8220;of color&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And <em>of course<\/em>, there&#8217;s no such plan, and you&#8217;re a racist to think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Except that ou<a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/columns\/benshapiro\/2022\/05\/18\/the-medias-big-lie-about-the-great-replacement-theory-and-conservatism-n1598825\">r dominant political class was celebrating the idea, before they started telling us that not only is there no such thing, but you&#8217;re racist for thinking it exists at all<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which is, of course, the political class&#8217;s MO these days; promote something radical and utterly fractious &#8211; CRT, Schools primacy over parents, election integrity, third trimester abortion, gun control, the Disinformation Bureau &#8211; and then cry &#8220;That doesn&#8217;t EXIST, and you&#8217;re being paranoid&#8221; when called on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So &#8211; why are &#8220;white supremacists&#8221; suddenly everywhere?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because, despite four years of &#8220;white supremacy is everywhere &#8211; who are you gonna believe, us, or your lying eyes?&#8221;, more black and latino voters pulled the level for Donald Trump than any Republican in sixty years &#8211; because, notwithstanding all the alarmism about &#8220;white supremacy&#8221;, their <em>lives got better<\/em>. After four years of hearing Trump&#8217;s border policy called &#8220;Racist&#8221; and &#8220;White Supremacist&#8221;, Latinos &#8211; who favor a tough border policy at levels that make white Republicans look like Oberlin humanities sophomores &#8211; voted for Trump at levels Republicans may have never seen. And the ever-more-extreme Democratic party is running with one of the worst two year records in memory; stagflation, collapse in Afghanistan, Covid <em>not<\/em> eradicated, five dollar gas, no baby formula, a looming recession and Europe at war &#8211; they&#8217;ve got to convince the black and latino parts of their base that if they don&#8217;t vote Democrat, there are going to be guys in pointy white hoods and swastikas parading down their streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let&#8217;s cut the crap; articles like this aren&#8217;t about people &#8220;speaking out&#8221; &#8211; literally everyone that matters has been speaking out against &#8220;white supremacy&#8221; for a century, now. They&#8217;re like the &#8220;Ninety Seconds of Hate&#8221; from Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984&#8221;, they&#8217;re about ensuring people are reacting to stimuli with sufficient zeal, and shaming or removing those that don&#8217;t parrot the chanting points on cue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Holding entire racial groups accountable for the behavior of their most aberrant members is exactly the same sort of evil that brought us &#8220;white supremacy&#8221;, and every other race-based evil of this wretched past century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[1] Raspberry &#8211; a center-leftist straight out of the 1980s, would be cast out of today&#8217;s hard left for writing things like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deseret.com\/2005\/5\/16\/19892393\/william-raspberry-still-racism-in-u-s-what-we-do-matters-more\">this<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.djournal.com\/opinion\/william-raspberry-eliminating-racism-looks-more-difficult\/article_d36a3dd8-0677-5d4a-996e-67d7d28eaa3f.html\">this<\/a>.  Indeed, you see some leftist columnists labeling Raspberry a &#8220;conservative&#8221;, which I&#8217;m sure would have amused him, were he around to defend himself; he died in 2012.  <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Are you now or have you ever been a &#8216;white supremacist&#8217;?&#8221; The spirit of Tailgunner Joe lives on. This article came out the other day, demanding that white people &#8220;speak out against White Supremacy&#8221;. OK. White Supremacy sucks. Now what? There are indeed &#8220;white supremacists&#8221; out there. Like all racial supremacists &#8211; Nazis, Hutu, HAMAS, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-ebony-and-ivory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82185,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82184\/revisions\/82185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}