Friday, April 03, 2015

"Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era."



Image result for southern white males images

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we will learn about the angry white male.

"Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).
There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s.

Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

A large proportion of the extreme right wing are military veterans. Several leaders served in Vietnam and were shocked at the national disgust that greeted them as they returned home after that debacle. “America’s failure to win that war was a truly profound blow,” writes William J. Gibson. “If Americans were no longer winners, then who were they?” Some veterans believed they were sold out by the government, caving in to effeminate cowardly protesters; they can no longer trust the government to fight for what is right. Bo Gritz, a former Green Beret in Vietnam, returned to Southeast Asia several times in clandestine missions to search for prisoners of war and was the real-life basis for the film Rambo. He uses his military heroism to increase his credibility among potential recruits; one brochure describes him as “this country’s most decorated Vietnam veteran” who “killed some 400 Communists in his illustrious military career.” In 1993 Gritz began a traveling SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) training program, a rigorous survival course in paramilitary techniques.

Many of the younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game, serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed they were entitled to be hailed as heroes, as had earlier generations of American veterans, not to be scorned as outcasts. Now a guy like Bo Gritz symbolizes “true” warrior-style masculinity, and reclaiming their manhood is the reward for signing up with the Far Right.

THE CLASS ORIGINS OF RACIAL POLITICS

Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men. All of the men I interviewed—all—fitted this class profile. When I compared with other ethnographies and other surveys, they all had the same profile as well.

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the “urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about “welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen spelled CLASS.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.


That’s certainly what I found among them. Most are in their mid-thirties to early forties, educated at least through high school and often beyond. (The average age of the guys I talked with was thirty-six.) They are the sons of skilled workers in industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’ legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small shops squeezed out by Walmarts and malls. These young men face a spiral of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight and at worst complicit in their demise.

And they’re right. It is the lower middle class—that strata of independent farmers, small shopkeepers, craft and highly skilled workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs—that has been hit hardest by globalization. “Western industry has displaced traditional crafts—female as well as male—and large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the independent farmer to the status of hired hand,” writes journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. This has resulted in massive male displacement—migration, downward mobility. It has been felt the most not by the adult men who were the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and skilled workers, but by their sons, by the young men whose inheritance has been seemingly stolen from them. They feel entitled and deprived—and furious. These angry young men are the foot soldiers of the armies of rage that have sprung up around the world.

What’s important to note is that they are literally the sons. It was their fathers who closed the family store, who lost the family farm. Some are men who have worked all their adult lives, hoping to pass on the family farm to their sons and retire comfortably. They believed that if they worked hard, their legacy would be ensured, but they leave their sons little but a legacy of foreclosures, economic insecurity, and debt.

It was their status next to their father’s and grandfather’s names on the cabinetmaking storefront that said “Jones and Sons.” These were businesses that came not only with the ability to make a living, but came with dignity, with a sense of craft pride, a sense that you owned your own store or farm, owned and controlled your own labor—even employed some other people—and that this economic autonomy had been a source of great pride in the family for generations. In a near-throwaway footnote in his classic study of identity development, “Childhood and Society” (1950), Erik Erikson locates the origins of young men’s anger in a multigenerational story:
In psychoanalytic patients the overwhelming importance of the grandfather is often apparent. He may have been a blacksmith of the old world or a railroad builder of the new, and as yet proud Jew or an unreconstructed Southerner. What these grandfathers have in common is that fact that they were the last representatives of a more homogeneous world, masterly and cruel with good conscience, disciplined and pious without loss of self-esteem. Their world invented bigger and better machinery like gigantic playthings which were not expected to challenge the social values of the men who made them. Their mastery persists in their grandsons as a stubborn, an angry sense of superiority. Overtly inhibited, they yet can accept others only on terms of prearranged privilege.
“It wasn’t my daddy’s farm,” said Andy, “it was my granddaddy’s, and his daddy’s, and his daddy’s. Five generations of Hoosier farmers.” Generations of Hoosier men, who worked the farm, supported a family, made a living with dignity. They proved their masculinity in that most time-honored way in America: as family providers. And it was their fathers who lost it all, squandered their birthright. Instead of getting angry at their fathers, Andy and his comrades claim the mantle of the grandfathers, displace their rage outward, onto an impermeable and unfeeling government bureaucracy that didn’t offer help, onto soulless corporations that squeezed them mercilessly. By displacing their anger onto those enormous faceless entities, the sons justify their political rage and rescue their own fathers from their anger.

Some can’t do it. Some of the sons—and the fathers—turn their rage inward. We have already discussed the wave of suicides that rippled across the American heartland in the 1980s and 1990s—spawning widespread concern and a series of Farm Aid concerts to raise awareness. The number of suicides in America’s Midwest was higher in the 1990s than during the Great Depression; suicide was the leading cause of agricultural fatalities for two decades—by far. Men were five times more likely to kill themselves than die by accident. “To fail several generations of relatives (both backwards and forwards into those unborn descendants who will now not be able to farm), to see yourself as the one weak link in a strong chain that spans more than a century, is a terrible, and for some, an unbearable burden,” writes Osha Gray Davidson. “When a fellow in a steel mill loses his job, he has basically lost his paycheck,” a physician at the University of Iowa explained. “When an Iowa farmer loses his farm, he’s lost the guts of his life.”....

....So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America’s small towns who can’t make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.

WALKING THE PATRIOTIC CAPITALIST TIGHTROPE

You might think that the political ideology of the white supremacist movement is as simple as their list of enemies: put down minorities, expel immigrants, push the women out of the workplace, and round up and execute the gays and the Jews. But it’s not nearly so simple. Actually, they have to navigate some treacherous ideological waters and reconcile seemingly contradictory ideological visions with their emotions.

There are three parts to their ideological vision. For one thing, they are ferociously procapitalist. They are firm believers in the free market and free enterprise. They just don’t like what it’s brought. They like capitalism; they just hate corporations. They identify, often, as the vast middle class of office workers and white-collar employees, even though that is hardly their class background. (They’ve a fungible understanding of class warfare.) “For generations, white middle class men defined themselves by their careers, believing that loyalty to employers would be rewarded by job security and, therefore, the ability to provide for their families” is the way one issue of Racial Loyalty (a racist skinhead magazine) puts it. “But the past decade—marked by an epidemic of takeovers, mergers, downsizings and consolidations—has shattered that illusion.”

Aryans support capitalist enterprise and entrepreneurship, even those who make it rich, but especially the virtues of the small proprietor, but are vehemently antiurban, anticosmopolitan, and anticorporate. In their eyes, Wall Street is ruled by Jewish-influenced corporate plutocrats who hate “real” Americans. Theirs is the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of producers—not financiers, not bankers, and not those other “masters of the universe” whose entire careers consist of cutting the cake ever more finely and living on the crumbs. It’s Andrew Jackson’s producerist attack on the “parasitic” bankers. It is “the desire to own small property, to produce crops and foodstuffs, to control local affairs, to be served but never coerced by a representative government, and to have traditional ways of life and labor respected,” writes historian Catherine Stock.

White supremacists see themselves as squeezed between global capital and an emasculated state that supports voracious global profiteering. In the song “No Crime Being White,” Day of the Sword, a popular racist skinhead band, confronts the greedy class:
The birthplace is the death of our race.
Our brothers being laid off is a truth we have to face.
Take my job, it’s equal opportunity
The least I can do, you were so oppressed by me
I’ve only put in twenty years now.
Suddenly my country favors gooks and spicks and queers.
Fuck you, then, boy I hope you’re happy when your new employees are the reason why your business ends.
Second, the extreme Right is extremely patriotic. They love their country, their flag, and everything it stands for. These are the guys who get teary at the playing of the national anthem, who choke up when they hear the word America. They have bumper stickers on their pick ups that show the flag with the slogan “These colors don’t run.”

The problem is that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live. They love America—but they hate its government. They believe that the government has become so un-American that it has joined in global institutions that undermine and threaten the American way of life. Many fuse critiques of international organizations such as the United Nations with protectionism and neoisolationism, arguing that all internationalisms are part of a larger Zionist conspiracy. Some embrace a grand imperial vision of American (and other Aryan) domination and the final subjugation of “inferior races.” [More]

It's a long article, but it is worth reading. I suspect that your perception of the article will depend on your race, your gender, and your political affiliation.

In other words, a lot of you won't like it. But that's fine. This is what makes America great: the ability to debate various issues, no matter how sensitive or complex.

Most of us can live with that. Most of us. There are some who, as the author articulated above, are having a hard time adjusting.

*Pic from salon.com


51 comments:

Anonymous said...

Field,

Have you ever driven a Monster Truck? If do, how hard was it?


P.S. This is not a sexual question.

Anonymous said...

Super great article! I love these kind of articles that analyze a complex situation and give a plausible viewpoint on it.

I'm thinking that may be why those agents did not do anything to Cliven Bundy with that land situation, because they identified with him?

Anonymous said...

What a bunch of nonsense.

White Supremacy is so far down the list of America's problems that it is an exercise of either absurdity or distraction to pen such an article.

white nationalist said...

The problem is that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live. They love America—but they hate its government. They believe that the government has become so un-American that it has joined in global institutions that undermine and threaten the American way of life. Many fuse critiques of international organizations such as the United Nations with protectionism and neoisolationism, arguing that all internationalisms are part of a larger Zionist conspiracy.

Leaving aside the conspiracy theories, this is a fairly accurate summation of the decades long campaign the government has been waging against the legacy majority.

Some embrace a grand imperial vision of American (and other Aryan) domination and the final subjugation of “inferior races.”

No. Unless by "some" you mean a tiny handful of weirdos. Most white nationalists are tired of third world adventures where their sons pay far more of their share of blood than anyone else's do. For this the neocons call them "isolationists" (or "neoisolationists" in the terminology of this piece).

White people are being institutionally suppressed by race-based favoritism towards non-whites and systematically replaced by a concerted policy of mass third world immigration. Their own government is doing this to them and funding it with money extracted from them.

Black people are not the enemy of white people. This is being perpetrated by the ruling class for their own profit and security.

This is a monstrous betrayal by the elites on scale unprecedented in human history. One way or the other, there will be blood.

dinthebeast said...

And right on cue, there is an example of what the article is talking about.

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

"Black people are not the enemy of white people. This is being perpetrated by the ruling class for their own profit and security."

Dostoevsky once said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn’t exist. I think the greatest trick Big Business ever pulled was convincing the world that the oh-so-humanitarian left isn’t a horde of useful idiots at best, and corporate-controlled shills at worst.

Anonymous said...

Giving Americans the freedom to draw and defend their borders restricts the freedom of colonists and invaders. Giving me the freedom of having a front door restricts the freedom of burglars and squatters. Giving people in Indiana the freedom to decide with whom they wish to associate restricts the freedom of those who want to involuntarily force association upon them.

Anonymous said...

"I'm thinking that may be why those agents did not do anything to Cliven Bundy with that land situation, because they identified with him?"

No, I'd say that was just politics.

Responding with an armed insurrection to federal officers merely attempting to enforce the laws of the land would have justified a brutal response by the officers. Truthfully, I don't think it would've been excessive force if they'd called in an airstrike on those militia jackasses.

But their crispy corpses wouldn't have looked good on CNN, which is why it didn't happen.

Josh said...

I love how people who feign as if they're intellectually and objectively examining something just use wishy-washy language, equivocate incessantly, project hardcore, and couldn't be more nebulous about something if they were paid to be so.

"I suspect that your perception of the article will depend on your race, your gender, and your political affiliation."

Or how about also one's intellectual honesty or capacity to see straight through the hackneyed prose of privileged intelligentsia who seek to "dissect" something but simply ascribe to it motives that it didn't ask for, didn't reveal, and didn't turn up objectively -- rather motives that are strict opinion and nothing but opinion, posing as some twisted objectivity?

Most of this article seems, to me, little more than projection from someone who has an ingrained stereotype of a right-wing southerner and subsequently ascribes to them all the qualities he/she suspects they really have through his/her understanding of the caricature.

Which is awfully ironic when you break this down. Those same white supremacists would do the same when writing about blacks or Jews. Use the caricature, ascribe to it its motives and qualities, posit the opinion as objective, demonstrable fact in description, and use the aforementioned to paint a sweeping conclusion about an entire people.

Just because this is about those stupid fucking inbred white supremacist morons doesn't make it any less a piece of projection-heavy horseshit posing as literature.

field negro said...

Josh, why do u say the author was being "wishy-washy"? I think the author was quite clear. The irrational fear of brown people by those in the majority population will hasten the demise of this potentially great country.

Yes Anon, I have driven a monster truck. And I actually enjoyed the experience. I consider myself a good driver.

OptimusPrime said...

Josh Wins Again!

We are getting closer to intellectual honesty.
Progressive Radical Equalitarianism as a religion is an excellent description of this movement. Bill and country lawyer, welcome to the discussion.

My questions are, what problem are we trying to solve, how does solving this problem help everybody, and what are the costs of solving or not solving the problems?


The 'reasonable' mind troops await Mr FN.

p said...

Josh said...
"Those same white supremacists would do the same when writing about blacks or Jews. Use the caricature, ascribe to it its motives and qualities, posit the opinion as objective, demonstrable fact in description, and use the aforementioned to paint a sweeping conclusion about an entire people."

We all talk endlessly about the friction at the edges, but never admit the inherent tension between "freedom" and and relatively new concept called “nondiscrimination.” Whether they are angelic liberal moral paragons or satanic teapartiers, free people will discriminate. And in a vast array of manners.

It would be useful if this could be openly acknowledged without triggering a hysterical tirade of hate. Alas, it may not.

But not speaking about doesn't mean it isn't there. And granted latitude, people will do, say, and think what others want them not free to do. Those same others, in turn, will desire a range of motion that additional factions will want equally restricted.

And for each, the line in the sand position is:

We want to be free to speak and associate exactly as we please, and for you to do exactly as we say.

Everything else is a lie marinated in moralizing. And the winners are those who have the platform, discipline, or guns to maintain their lie to victory.

So bake that cake, Mr. Christian Baker, and smile when you do it.

Faith_and_Fairness said...

Though you've mentioned being agnostic, Mr. Field, it's amazing how the Holy Spirit is touching this forum, especially this holiest of seasons of the liturgical calendar.

At Good Friday service, the predominant themes were sacrifice, love, compassion, forgiveness and understanding. And this Salon article is too profound for words.

@Josh... I respectfully disagree... It could be said the author of this piece takes a common-sense approach of delving into the human aspect of what is perceived as "the angry white male."

Perhaps a great start to dismantling most "isms" (racism, classism, sexism, ect.) is understanding the source of the angers and concerns that are impeding the effective solutions.

Anonymous said...

"delving into the human aspect of what is perceived as "the angry white male."

Do white males have any legitimate reasons to be angry?

Bill said...


When talking about racists Field Negro has no problem writing or copy/pasting about Christians.

When talking about Kenyan students being slaughtered Field Negro didn't believe the religion of the victims mattered nor the religion of the killers mattered nor the reason for the killing of what Field Negro called "One hundred and forty seven innocent people."

Gotta love how Field Negro faithfully obeys the dumbocrat religious talking points.


I wonder why gay dumbocrats never try asking Muslim bakers to bake gay wedding cakes.
Or reporters go into Muslim owned restaurants and demand them to cater a gay wedding like they do with Christian restaurants.

There must be a good reasons dumbocrats only target certain religions for gay homophobia.


Not all religions are equal to Field Negro.

Limpbaugh said...

Conservatism seems to be pretty synomynous with racism to me. Living in isolation seems to also have something to do with it. David E. Campbell of Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam of Harvard did a study about it and wrote the book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.
They used a survey of 3,000 people taken before the Tea Party started. Then they went back and questioned the people again. Tea Baggers like to say they are Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans, but the study showed they were really just the most conservative Republicans before the Tea Party started.

They were also the most racist Republicans. Not all Republicans became Tea Baggers. Everyone ranked twenty four groups, Catholics, Jews, atheists, Muslims, etc. Most people liked Tea Baggers the least, but the Tea Baggers liked blacks and Mexicans least. Their most common answer for why they don't like Obama was, "I don't know, I just don't like him."

A lot of them were males from the south, and they wanted religious political leaders. Spending cuts weren't as important to them as the Tea Party likes to say. The Tea Party might not be exactly what it started out as, but the study showed the Tea Party movement was really about protesting that the president is black.

As far as my own race, gender, and political affiliation, I'm a white male. I've voted Democrat in the past, but I don't plan to vote for Democrats or Republicans in the future. The lesser of two evils bar has sunk to low for me. I'm an Independent now. If I could take back my votes for Bill Clinton, I would. NAFTA destroyed the economy and allowing the media to consolidate turned us fascist. I'm a 9/11 truther. I believe the government told us a scientifically impossible explanation for 9/11 and the media covered it up for them. They pretty much told us that Building 7 collapsed from burning carpet melting more than 80 steel columns at the same time. The owner admitted they decided to "pull it", there is video of firefighters telling people it was coming down, and even NIST admitted that it fell at the speed of gravity as if there wasn't any building below the top. There are other questions about 9/11 but the biggest smoking gun is Building 7, the third skyscraper that fell, and the one that wasn't hit by a plane. You rarely hear about it on the corporate media. I'm against racism, but I'm primarily a peace activist. The fascism is so bad that most other issues, like the Keystone pipeline, don't matter to me anymore.

Bill said...


field negro said...
Yes Anon, I have driven a monster truck. And I actually enjoyed the experience. I consider myself a good driver


Driving monster trucks, hanging on a Catalina ferry with Chuck Berry, hanging with NBA LAKER legend Magic Johnson, boarding school, law degree...

Sounds like someone is living a very privileged life. :)

p said...

Bill said...
"I wonder why gay dumbocrats never try asking Muslim bakers to bake gay wedding cakes.
Or reporters go into Muslim owned restaurants and demand them to cater a gay wedding like they do with Christian restaurants."

Because like the other version, the baker knock-out game only goes one way. It has become quite chic for upper middle class gays to specifically seek out small family businesses not inclined to make sodomy celebration confections and either force them into their own ovens or sue them into bankruptcy for such impertinence.

These are champions of tolerance, you see.

The Indiana law was an attempt to forestall this playful movement before it could find traction in the Hoosier state.

But the people of Indiana were incorrect in their assumption that they had the right to decide just how much tolerance for the freedom of religion they thought was proper.

Bakers and photographers cannot choose whom they do business with, but the CEO of Apple can.

Hoosiers can’t discriminate against gays, but gays can discriminate against Hoosiers.

Discrimination is for winners.

Yīshēng said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yīshēng said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yīshēng said...

Bill said...
Sounds like someone is living a very privileged life. :)
>>>>>>>

And in the face of blatant racism and discrimination, that ANY person can of color can succeed in America is nothing short of a miracle.

Faith_and_Fairness said...

"Do white males have any legitimate reasons to be angry?"

In reply to Anon 12:33p.....Think another question is "Based on the grievances cited in the Salon article, do these white Americans residing in rural or farmland areas have a legitimate right to feel angry"?

If the conversation centered on Wall St figures, corporate entities and policymakers, it can be argued this is not the aggrieved segment.

But how can we not empathize with working class communities who believed the American dream was a matter of working hard only to become the generation facing foreclosures, shuttered businesses and entire livelihoods wiped out to the point where they have nothing to pass down to their children?

The ultimate irony is both rural and urban America have more in common than differences. Yet as other posters stated, the powers that be, often in the form of the media, are in charge of the narrative that pits race and class against one another.

Anonymous said...

Yīshēng said...
And in the face of blatant racism and discrimination, that ANY person can of color can succeed in America is nothing short of a miracle.
---

It actually would take a miracle for you to become a doctor.

This has nothing to do with your color, without which you couldn't have run this scam for so long.

Stop externalizing your failures, and take some responsibility for your life. No one hates you because you're black. They hate you because you are such an ungrateful, self-entitled bitch.

white nationalist said...

Faith_and_Fairness said...
"The ultimate irony is both rural and urban America have more in common than differences. Yet as other posters stated, the powers that be, often in the form of the media, are in charge of the narrative that pits race and class against one another."

Yes.

The government wages war against the interest of working and middle class whites, but not for the benefit of blacks, who have it worse than anyone.

Blacks are the cannon fodder in the war of the elites on traditional America.

The toll on black communities has been horrific. As the clamps get screwed down even tighter, things are going to get much, much, worse for all of us.

Yīshēng said...

Just gotta' mention, Serena Williams dominates women's tennis once again!!

Yaaaaassssssssss!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Is Serena Williams the one who looks someone shaved a gorilla and put it in a tennis dress?

Anonymous said...

Faith_and_Fairness said...

Yet as other posters stated, the powers that be, often in the form of the media, are in charge of the narrative that pits race and class against one another.

2:07 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes such as Field right? He's always publishing narratives that pit the races against each other!

Instead of jes publishing and writin kumbaya,er'body be happy stuff!

Anonymous said...

"I wonder why gay dumbocrats never try asking Muslim bakers to bake gay wedding cakes.
Or reporters go into Muslim owned restaurants and demand them to cater a gay wedding like they do with Christian restaurants."


What makes you think Muslims are somehow immune from anti-discrimination laws. They aren't. You just haven't heard much about it because there haven't been any such cases that have come up. There are lots of reasons for this.

First, because there aren't that many Muslim businesses, due to the fact there simply aren't that many Muslims in this country. Muslims make up less than 1% of the U.S. population.

Second, because it is less likely that gay Muslims are going to be challenging businesses in their own ethnic/religious communities over this. Muslims feel like they are under siege in this country and need the support of those communities, so they will be less quick than other gay people to file a lawsuit and piss their communities off.

But just wait a few years. As anti-discrimination protections for gays expand across the country, you can expect to start seeing some right-wing Muslim businesses get sued by gay people. It is guaranteed to happen.

Al Iberace said...

Some idiot said..
"Second, because it is less likely that gay Muslims are going to be challenging businesses in their own ethnic/religious communities over this. Muslims feel like they are under siege in this country and need the support of those communities"

It is less likely that gay Muslims are going to be challenging businesses in their own ethnic/religious communities over this because their own ethnic/religious community would kill them if they did.

Anonymous said...

"It is less likely that gay Muslims are going to be challenging businesses in their own ethnic/religious communities over this because their own ethnic/religious community would kill them if they did."

Oh right, I forgot: Muslims are really really violent, but Christians aren't.

Well, except for the Christian gay bashers and abortion clinic bombers and such. But they don't count. I forget why.

And then there's this lovely, devout follower of Jesus, who is attempting to put an item on the ballot in California to execute people for being gay.

http://news.yahoo.com/california-lawyer-proposes-ballot-measure-execute-gays-191800967.html

Tell me again how evangelical Christians are so very different from the Taliban. Because I'm not really seeing it.

Josh said...

Field,

I mean "wishy-washy" as in intentionally nebulous and far too inclusive to the stereotyped character traits of right-wingers in general to be effectual and deterministic about a very specific subset--necessarily specific--of individuals who (unfortunately) exist: White supremacists.

As the author continues on typing, he/she simply ascribes to a white supremacist practically every stereotyped negative personality trait and leaning of everyone/everything on the right-side of the aisle.

That's not a breakdown of the who, what, how and why of a white supremacist. That's merely projecting onto a white supremacist that said individual is basically indiscernible from a white southern conservative. Which just ends up being a projection-heavy hit-piece and not at all different than how a white supremacist would write about a black person.

Al Iberace said...

Some idiot said...
"Well, except for the Christian gay bashers and abortion clinic bombers and such. But they don't count. I forget why."

You forget a lot.

How many instances of Christian gay bashing or abortion clinic bombings can you cite this century?

It's pretty close to zero.

There have been over 25,000 terror attacks done in the name of Islam since 9/11 alone.

But you, you fucking genius, can't see any difference between the religions.

Nor do you comprehend the salient point that no established Christian religious institutions condone any such violence and in fact condemn it in the strongest terms, while Muslim religious leaders promote murder and mayhem across the globe.

No matter what is done in the name of Islam, you know who your enemy is: The Christian guy next door.

Priorities, priorities....

Anonymous said...

"Nor do you comprehend the salient point that no established Christian religious institutions condone any such violence and in fact condemn it in the strongest terms, while Muslim religious leaders promote murder and mayhem across the globe."

No, it is you who do not comprehend.

Only fringe Islamic leaders endorse jihadism. The majority of Muslims and their leaders condemn it.

They are absolutely no different than fringe Christian leaders like John Hagee or Terry Jones, who condone indiscriminate violence toward Muslims. They do not represent the majority of Christians.

You think there is some giant difference here between Christians and Muslims, but there isn't. The percentage of Muslims that are extremists might be slightly higher than the percentage of Christians that are extremists, but it is still a distinct minority.

About 20% of the planet's populace are Muslims. Only a small segment of those are whackjobs. That reality won't change, even if you refuse to accept it.

Anonymous said...

"The percentage of Muslims that are extremists might be slightly higher than the percentage of Christians that are extremists,"

Willful ignorance is a curious thing.

Josh said...

"The percentage of Muslims that are extremists might be slightly higher than the percentage of Christians that are extremists,"

It depends on how one defines "extremist."

Let's be PERFECTLY honest at Field's for a change.

There are completely distinct ways by which we define "extreme" based on religion.

A) For a Christian to be "extreme," all that Christian need be is:

- opposed to gay marriage
- a supporter of the NRA
- a creationist who believes the earth is 5,000 years old
- a conservative
- someone who thinks there's a war on Christmas
- someone who opposes abortion

That's all a Christian need believe to be considered "extreme."

B) For a Muslim to be considered "extreme," a Muslim would have to:

- throw acid in a woman's face
- blow shit up

Everything else a Muslim might believe, like gays being evil, Sharia needing to be enforced, etc, etc, is considered to be moderate.

We hold Muslims to such an incredibly low standard, juxtaposing all Muslims against terrorists, that apart from brutally disfiguring a woman or outright killing someone, we will consider a Muslim a moderate individual -- even if said Muslim believes in and agrees with jihad and shouts "Allahu Akbar" as other Muslims maim and murder.

Christians, on the other hand, are considered "extreme" at the drop of a hat, even if they've never killed and are greatly opposed to killing. If said Christian believes gays make a choice, boom, we hit them with the "EXTREMIST" label, while practically speaking you couldn't find enough Muslims even in America who believe Allah allows people to be born gay to fill a Prius. But nobody calls them "extreme" until they do some extreme shit.

PilotX said...

Very interesting article but we kinda knew what time it was. Poor, uneducated whites who didn't do as well as their daddies have issues. They loved the stories of the "good old days" when their granddaddies could string up uppity negroes buit now they just have to stew in their own juices and pine for the race war they are sure will come.

Josh said...

"...but we kinda knew what time it was."

Field, this sorta plays to my point.

No real citations. No studies. No logical deductions from anything. No tangible categorization of any set/subset to work up any sort of identifiable type. Just, as Pilot sums up perfectly, extrapolating from a "type" the caricature characteristics to put on another "type" to say that X = X because of Y. No rhyme, no reason, just sophistry.

The Purple Cow said...

"No real citations. No studies. No logical deductions from anything. No tangible categorization of any set/subset to work up any sort of identifiable type. Just, as Pilot sums up perfectly, extrapolating from a "type" the caricature characteristics to put on another "type" to say that X = X because of Y. No rhyme, no reason, just sophistry."

Typical Josh reaction, he's so lazy. On the one hand he's desperate to convince us of his intellectual superiority, but on the other hand he's too lazy to do any work!

If you want rhyme, reason and sub-sets Josh, read Kimmel's book.

Coffee and Cigarettes said...

This story can be mirrored around the world. A french social critic, forgot his name, spoke of his surprise that his rural family started voting for Marie Le Pen's far right party. He'd been embarrassed by his father who he described as "sexist, racist, homophobic." They'd always voted socialist, but upon his return from University, they were voting far right. Similar scenario in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the rural folk have turned to the Taliban. Zizek ascribed it to the absence of a viable left. People have genuine grievances-corruption, nepotism, economic inequality etc-yet there is an absence of a grounded international left. Hence grievances are channelled by negative forces, forces that play upon primitive fears and false victimhood.

OptimusPrime said...

Purple Cow,

Please join the reasonable minds' crew. We think you have something to add to the solution to diffusing the inequality bombs that distract us all. Can you enlighten us on the topic?

You seem very intellectual.

I think PilotX is improving by the day. I think Josh is attacking the intellectual honesty of our logic, not the inferiority.

I wish we could all look at a FN post and figure out what we all suspect,

"We are all being had, took, hoodwinked, Bamboozled, Led astray Run amok; by various self-serving interest groups; who have no real interest in 'Golden Rule' principles on which this great country was founded"

We are supposed to be striving for a MORE PERFECT UNION because we are the shining beacon on a hill, but somehow we keep losing our way.

I'm not as bright as you guys, that's why i keep asking questions

OptimusPrime said...

As minorities, how do we assist angry white disenfranchised males?

Heavy is the head that wears the crown

Anonymous said...

"As minorities, how do we assist angry white disenfranchised males?"

Nothing minor about us blah people. In a global sense white people are the minority.

Hattie said...

This is fantastic because it explains where white male sense of entitlement comes from. It's based on what their grandfathers did. That is very astute.

Josh said...

"Typical Josh reaction..."

If you say so...

"he's so lazy."

Probably. I only work 50-hour weeks now, down from 65 last year.

"On the one hand he's desperate to convince us of his intellectual superiority..."

I don't even know what that means. I'm not one of Field's posters who run around bragging about where they went to school, what they do for a living, etc. You're simply projecting here, ThePurpleMarxist.

Check your privilege, shitlord!


"...but on the other hand he's too lazy to do any work!"

Yeah, because, in some strange version of the universe, where logic is inverted and the Socratic method never existed, it's not the claimant's job to prove the claim; it's the job of the person receiving that claim--reading it, hearing it, etc--to prove the claim for the claimant!

"If you want rhyme, reason and sub-sets Josh, read Kimmel's book."

Typical non-answer response to keep the goal posts moving, those red herrings flying, and the non sequiturs erupting with regularity.

"Hey, if you want to know why my claim holds water without me, the claimant, having to actually prove it, go read this cherry-picked literature until which point YOU understand why I make baseless claims!

If ever I come across like I'm presenting myself as intellectually superior, I'm deducing from TPC's idiocy that it's simply a happenstance of the juxtaposition of his intellectual inferiority in attempting constantly to explain away shit in the strangest possible ways.

The guy can't get through a day without stepping knee-deep in dozens of different logical fallacies, yet he's so supremely confident in his own abilities that they're shrugged off like it's everyone else's fault.

It's not my job to prove or support or find evidence for other people's claims.

"Go read X book!" isn't evidence; it's misdirection.

Anonymous said...

The Purple Cow said...
Typical Josh reaction, he's so lazy. On the one hand he's desperate to convince us of his intellectual superiority, but on the other hand he's too lazy to do any work!
---

He does enough work to convince me he is intellectually superior to you.

He is exactly right about this piece, which is a faux 'analysis' attempting to classify dissent to the simple liberal worldview as pathological.

Josh said...

It reminds me of the newest "lexicon" of feminist terminology to sprout green from whole cloth.

The problem: Feminist writers were getting criticized for a lack of objectivity, a lack of facts, and using sophistry in lieu of logic.

The objective: Create from thin air the standards that will make any and all criticism sexist.

The solution: Find criticisms, categorize them based on severity, and give every "type" of criticism categorized a cool name--e.g. "sealioning"--and subsequently claim that it's all rooted in sexism.

The result: Now no feminist writer can ever be criticized at any time without it being explicitly sexist.

This is one of the many benefits of existing in your own universe, wherein a vain individual is its center mass. These people get to custom-tailor their entire existence to suit their own vanity. They literally create and use their own language. They've crafted a catch-22 for the entire rest of the world. Their self-awareness is nonexistent, but they don't fucking need it anyway. They exist independent the outside world, and they're strewn all over academia teaching this shit to impressionable kids who are looking already to buck the system.

Little difference in this 7th-grade-level breakdown of white supremacists. It seems to be an author simply sprouting green from whole cloth the "reasons" people become that type, and subsequently describing them as basically everything negative one says about right-wingers colloquially. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, not an honest and logical analysis.

And despite the illogical appeal to authority above, with the "go read the book" nonsense, which is undoubtedly based on someone's mere opinion anyway, the onus is on the claimant to show scientifically and logically how X = Y and what those traits are demonstrably and not through bare assertion.

Sophistry is fucking sickening.

Anonymous said...

Have you ever known someone who has two or more different peoples mixed in their parents that makes it extremely difficult for the child to take what's bad and make good? Have you known of two different mindsets of different parents who also had to choose which mindset to act upon? Have you ever had to see both sides of the story and pick your choice yourself when both sides were/are divided. And hope to God you made the right choice with no helping hand from either parent. Yeah,i was taught in educated british english,irish english,and afro english. So what side do i pick? Around british, i speak british, around irish,i speak irish, and around black, i try to speak afro english,but the words have a european accent. And i live in america in baltimore so i speak both kinds of that as well. Now,ive learned guyanese creolese. We all believed hard work and formal education would pay off. Due to my health thas not yet, but i have hopes not yet made manifest all in His good time. Yes it's natural to mourn for livelihood to be vanquished either slowly or suddenly. Its not one group against the other as so much. It is the groups's outliers that is causing problems. The outliers are getting media attention,not so much as us regular people. I see we're a bushel of crabs trying to outsmart each other to climb to the top. But we're mostly gonna get cooked and eaten anyway,or fed to the dogs.

Anonymous said...

Wow. It's been awhile since someone on the net stated that there is little difference between evangelical christians and the Taliban. About 5 minutes I would guess.

I've known some evangelicals in my life and having spent some time in Crapghanistan I can personally attest that there is no similarity between the two groups. The utter depravity and inhumanity of the Taliban is light years past anything an evangelical has done in a long while.

An argument could be made that evangelicals COULD be as bad as the Taliban, but that is pure hypothetical thinking. When evangelicals start escorting people into football stadiums for mass beheadings or attack a village (town) and gang rape every girl under the age of 16 then you can make the comparison. I've seen with my own eyes the aftermath of both scenarios and I can assure you they weren't comitted by Jeb, Ross and Steve from Nowhere, Arkansas. These acts were comitted by muslim scum.

Anonymous said...

There is already a race war happening. Check out the violent crime statistics of black on white crime. Even though most whites refuse to see the truth ( that almost ALL black people actively hate white people) at least our Latino friends know what's up with the Negro and are running them out of every neighborhood and town that they can.

It's a global truth. Nobody wants to live around black people. Not Asians. Not Latinos. Not Arabs. Not Indians. Not White people. Hell if the way blacks abandon black neighborhoods at the first opportunity is any indication black people don't even want to live around other black people

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