In the cosmic calendar of resistance, this may well be the Era of the Punched Nazi.

This fact has caused some consternation and hand-wringing among those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record. For the mainline liberals and conservatives who lament the punching of Richard Spencer, the young white supremacist activist who coined the term “alt-right,” Nazism remains a theoretical construct, an “idea” that can be debated and defeated without a shot being fired in anger. For the rest of us — for many Jews, for ethnic and religious minorities, for queer people — Nazism is an empirical fact with the solidity of iron roads leading to walled death camps.

The camps are Nazism’s endpoint; it is what Nazism is for. Nazism serves as a refuge for whites dislocated by mass society and modernity, who seek someone to blame for their anomic dread. With that in mind, we must be very explicit about what Nazism’s relationship to democracy must be, and refuse dangerous, whitewashing euphemisms when discussing it (e.g. “you support punching someone who disagrees with you”).

Such generalizing language is intellectually lazy at the best of times; here it is outright deadly. Yes, it could be said that I “disagree” with Spencer that a genocide of Black Americans is desirable, but I believe he should be punched because of the very real risk that he could galvanize such an event into actually happening. This is a fear supported by the tremendous weight of our history, and by the fact that we had to fight the bloodiest war of our species’ existence the last time Nazism came into conflict with modern democracy. To call this a “disagreement” is an unspeakable slight against millions of dead.

To be blunt: Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions.

Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter.
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Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death. There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else. Simply allowing Nazis onto a stage, as the BBC did when it let British National Party leader Nick Griffin sit and debate with political luminaries on its Question Time program, is to give them an invaluable moral victory. Like creationists who debate evolutionary biologists, the former benefit mightily from the prestige of the latter.

In using this tactic, Nazis abuse the democratic forum to illegitimately lend credence to something that is otherwise indefensible, the equality of the stage giving the unforgivable appearance of “two sides” to a position that is anathema to public decency. This is not because Nazis love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them.

But is it enough to say that we must meet Nazism with force because it is so terrible? It should be, morally. I would, however, add that there’s room to consider why force, specifically, is a necessary tool in these extreme times. There is a reason that it works against Nazis, adding weight to the argument that they are a special case where a normal ethic of nonviolence should be suspended.

The goals of Nazism have not changed, but some of its window dressing has. As he was being punched, Richard Spencer was showing off a lapel pin of Pepe, a cartoon character appropriated by extreme right and Nazi 4channers in their reactionary campaigns, which ultimately featured in many pro-Trump memes, some of which were retweeted by the man himself. The new exponents of modern Nazism are eager to exploit what they see as a constituency of young, tech-savvy white people whose online culture is a neat fit for them.

Nazis, It’s Time For A Common Sense Approach To Not Getting Punched

4chan’s “trolling” culture is built on a perverse ideal that prizes the use of offensive speech and borderline criminal behavior as a means of becoming a stronger, superior person. If you are ever offended by something, hurt by it, or made to fear for yourself, you’re weak, a “special snowflake” who’s been “triggered” and a “lolcow” (someone you should keep hurting because their reactions will be funny). In this ethic, all emotion (except rage, lust, or mirth) is weakness, something the troll can exploit to get big laughs for him and his fellows.

This notion has been exploited to great effect by people like Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who believes “America needs more trolls.” Yiannopoulos, who himself has a history of sympathy for Nazi ideas, and who has tried to lend respectability to Richard Spencer—calling him a “bright” “intellectual” figure on the “alt-right”—has since taken 4chan on the road, so to speak, using his university speaking engagements to gin up mob harassment of transgender students. Unable to resist a photogenic Nazi, the press has treated Yiannopoulos to numerous interviews. In one with the New York Times he literally said: “I don’t have feelings.” While this is an obvious lie, it fits with the troll culture ethos he seeks to promote.

The ideal man — the Trollermensch, if you like — is one who does not feel, who sociopathically wounds without empathy, who finds humor in even the most grotesque of suffering. In exchange, you feel no pain, no vulnerability; you cannot be hurt the way you are ruthlessly hurting others.

This is the alluring promise that 4chan’s culture has made to a generation of disaffected young men who feel powerless, adrift, and vulnerable in a rapidly changing world where being a white man is no longer a guarantee of success and prestige. Be mighty, hurt others, never get hurt again. But humanity, in all its little frailties, always catches up with us in the end.

After he was punched, Richard Spencer told the Times, “I am more worried about going to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kinds of people are roaming around,” adding on a Periscope video that “I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes, that I’m going to hate watching this.” Spencer, who was proudly touting and retweeting 4chan Pepe memes and cheering right along with Yiannopoulos about the world needing more trolling, was expressing fear and vulnerability. The facade had cracked; he was no Trollermensch, just human, equal to everyone he thought himself superior to, equal to everyone he’d see dead.

Nazis have long depended on something like trolling culture to work their dark magic. The concept of the “Big Lie” is right at home in an age of ideologically-driven 4chan hoaxes targeting women and minorities, and Nazism always relied on a certain chicanery to keep people guessing about their true intentions until it was too late — an eerie lesson for the present. Nazism’s fakery, and its ability to distort reality until ordinary people could not trust their own senses, bears more than a passing resemblance to 4chan’s culture of harassment and thuggish hoaxes. But the weak point was always the mythology of superiority and strength.

The Rise Of The ‘Alt Right’ And Religious Right Are Chillingly Similar

Deploying force against Nazis always revealed the lie that they belonged to a “Master Race.” And this was not just military force, mind you, but the rolled-up sleeves and bared fists of ordinary citizens who were determined to prevent the spread of fascism’s cancer. To look at British fascist leader Oswald Mosley disheveled after his rally was shut down by angry East End workers in July 1962 is to look not on the leader of a Master Race, but something considerably more ordinary and pathetic.

As I noted earlier, Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought. The only nonviolent solution is to marginalize Nazism from public life in our society — one may be free to hold these views, but not to try and spread them at the highest echelons of our public fora. When, however, someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate — many thinkers who lived through the Second World War, from Karl Popper, to Hannah Arendt, to Jean Paul Sartre, have been quite clear about why dispassionate discourse with men like Richard Spencer is not only pointless, but actively dangerous.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate.
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The use of force, by contrast, does reveal the shared humanity that Nazis deny. Our vulnerability is one of the things that links us all, seven billion strong, in a humane fragility. These are essential aspects of our humanity that both Nazi mythology and channer troll culture deny. Punching a Nazi, by contrast, reveals it. It reveals they are no masters, but quite eminently capable of fear, of pain, of vulnerability. And that takes the shine off; it eliminates their mystique, and it puts the lie to the idea that their ideology is an armor against the pains of modernity.

That alone justifies Richard Spencer being punched in the face on camera.

It jumped out of 2017 and scurried into the darkest corners. It latched on to satire’s face, only to burst from satire’s chest with the most ludicrous headlines. Overall, it was a bad, weird year, but men —  especially — did not come off looking good in 2018, and it’s time to examine what lessons we should glean from these past 12 months to make our collective futures less bad and weird…maybe even better.

#1 Words vs. Conduct: Louis C.K.

In response to displaying his penis at non-consenting women, comedian Louis C.K. took time off to allegedly reconsider himself. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he said in November 2017. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”  

That lasted all of five minutes.

Mr. C.K. was back on stage just a few months later, and was recently recorded dressing up his white guy whines as comedy, including his chagrin when people with Down syndrome asked the word ‘r***rded’ not be used anymore (he felt his freedom was invaded); he mocked black and Asian men, berated trans people, and belittled the students of the Parkland shooting who survived a horrific massacre.

The question is not whether he’s allowed to say these things – as far as I know, he’s not been charged – but whether he should.

Despite admitting to the sexual misconduct, C.K.’s response showed no development. Indeed, all his response did was cast off the veneer of the self-reflecting white guy that made him important to many of us: His insights into white privilege and being a (cishet) white man, for example, were poignant, challenging other white people.

His admitting of sexual misconduct should have been the catalyst for Mr. C.K. to use those assets he had cultivated to grow and to teach, as we know he’s capable of doing. Instead, Mr. C.K. simply became another angry, entitled white man, who viewed criticism as intolerance, progress as immorality and bigotry as entertainment.

The Lesson

People reveal their true selves at their lowest point, not at the height of comfort; it’s easy to be the good guy when you have nothing to lose, easy to use the right words to convey a belief. It’s much harder to demonstrate those beliefs via conduct. Men can easily learn to say the right words and support the right values without having to put any actual effort into themselves. This is why we have many cases of so-called good guys revealing the cracks made by patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

No one is claiming to be a good person you need to be perfect. Perfection is unattainable. Instead, part of what makes a good person is owning up to failure and mistakes, improving yourself and encouraging others like you to do the same, working toward never committing those same failings again. Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.

Having cultivated the image of a woke white man, with an audience receptive to his moral challenges, Mr. C.K. shrugged it all off and swam with the status quo; it was flowing in his preferred direction.

Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.
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Mr. C.K. is an interesting example because he shows what men should avoid but also—in his past—how men can be better: He used his privilege to speak out and challenge those like him. We need more men holding mirrors and fewer holding hammers.

#2 Listening to Women: Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari was accused by a woman of being incredibly inappropriate toward her, making her feel unsafe, and repeatedly ignoring her rejections of his come-ons. Ansari and the woman went on a date, back to his place, then he became increasingly aggressive: he kissed, fondled and so on, almost as soon as she was inside. As babe.net put it: “Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was.” After eventually leaving, she was in distress. When she messaged him some time later, he conveyed surprise and an apology.

In response to the whole story, many men pointed to the Weinsteins and Spaceys of the world as “actually” deserving condemnation, for their aggressive, criminal assaults – Ansari’s conduct was handwaved away as confusion, miscommunication, or somewhat fictional. He thought it was consensual and even apologized!

For many, Ansari’s bonafides as an outspoken feminist male comedian created a large fortress from such accusations: How could someone like that, who writes and thinks and discusses the nuances of dating, who proudly and vocally supports feminism, be at fault in this? Maybe this young woman has just reacted poorly!

What’s more important than the story however are the responses.

The Lesson

It’s easy for men to speak out against the criminal acts of Weinstein and Spacey. It’s far harder to reflect on Ansari’s situation. Yet, it’s precisely that the incident isn’t an obviously criminal one that makes it more troublesome. The reality is: More men have been an Ansari than a Weinstein.  

The chances are, if you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.

You can prevent a lot of that by reading and listening to women. Take a mild example, as noted by the brilliant Madeleine Holden: men who never ask their dates questions. As Holden notes, the men say the dates went amazingly, while the women note how these same men didn’t ask a single question about their dates. It wasn’t so much a date as an unprofessional, free therapy session. If men are not even reading the room when it comes to basic conversations in public, is it any wonder, in their—arguably—aggressively horny states, that men will not read or consider women’s comfort levels in private? Men can and must be better than this.

If you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, chances are you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.
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Patriarchy has taught men to equate our experience with truth, relegating other experiences to the language of sensitivity or ridiculousness. Instead of viewing women’s experiences as additional windows on the same experience, we dismiss those experiences as mere finger paintings.

Listen to women, not just in the immediate sense, but as an active part of your life — seek out their perspectives, pay attention, and read the goddamn room. (Also, you’re an adult in control of your conduct — you can’t use horniness as an excuse.)

#3 Opposing Nazis Works: Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer

If you’re worried only bad men had a good year, take some comfort: Both Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer had a terrible year.

Yiannopoulos, it was recently revealed, is almost $2 million in debt, and has lost a great deal of the fame he’d cultivated from the poisoned Nazi garden he had managed. He was banned from Patreon, Venmo, and PayPal. He also dropped his lawsuit against former publisher Simon & Schuster, after they refused to publish his (terrible) book.  

Spencer didn’t fare better. He cancelled his speaking tour due to low audience attendance but high numbers of anti-fascist protestors. Spencer’s wife filed for divorce, alleging he is a domestic abuser. He has had to rethink his strategy for spreading white supremacy and pro-fascism to young men – he’s been trying desperately not to say he’s losing to passionate anti-fascist protestors.

The Lesson

Actively not listening to fascists and Nazis works! As Rachel Kraus notes:

“The fact that Yiannopoulos has found his reach and influence so depleted that he can’t get new gigs and takes to comments on Facebook to complain shows the real world effect that de-platforming a toxic public figure can actually have.”

Spencer has stopped trying to lecture at universities because it’s far too troublesome, and his audience’s passion doesn’t match the numbers or organizational skills of his opponents.

We do not need to give equal time under the guise of fairness. Not all political issues are conceptual discussions about the best economic theory; some involve the lived experiences and social aspects of particular groups.

Nazis and pro-fascists aren’t giving alternative opinions about race or gender, they’re spreading hatred. They dress their supremacy under the guise of civil rights, complaining that their power is being taken from them, while at the same time saying those taking away power are beneath them. They never quite square this Swastika but it’s not about logic: hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.  

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to bring logic to a Klan meetup. Listen to those affected by hate groups, work toward actively opposing those wanting to spread Nazism and fascism and don’t give them even an inch. Men, in particular, are the leaders of these movements and it should be other men—especially white men—who speak out loudly, passionately and with full voice to their emotions.

Hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.
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The Nazi’s call for debate is a cheatcode to get you to debate people’s humanity, dragging you down into the racist trenches. Stay out, stay firm, yell, oppose, bring your placards, report abuse. We need more men showing emotion for good causes rather than ridiculous/racist/sexist ones.

‘Mister Journalist, I Gave You All the Clues’: How White Journos Keep Getting Punked By Nazis

Fascination with white nationalists who evince normal traits comes from fear of being implicated.

A counter-protester gives a white supremacist the middle finger in Charlottesville, 2017. (Credit: flickr/ Evan Nesterak)

The response to The New York Times’ unaccountable profile of an Ohio Nazi was swift and biting; the paper felt compelled to respond to the legions of people who, correctly, accused the paper of writing a puff piece on a white nationalist.

The reporter, Richard Fausset, wrote a follow-up piece for the Times Insider entitled “I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With?” which is notable for its conspicuous failure to answer its own question. Fausset instead meanders in a kind of literary agony, wringing his hands and acknowledging that his report provides no answers, while reaching to punk rock to pose a rhetorical question, “what causes a man to start fires?” In a piece of his own, Times national editor Marc Lacey took a broad survey of public comment on Fausset’s report, including quoting this tweet from Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer:

“People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that.”

This notion is at the heart of the whole controversy. It sounds smart, even wise, to say this. Are we not deluding ourselves, after all, when we act as if Nazis are these inhuman creatures from another dimension? Does this othering not deny our shared capacity for tremendous evil? Bauer pursues that point for dozens of tweets, even nastily snipping at actor and activist writer Mara Wilson, essentially accusing her of willful ignorance.

What Bauer, and those who make this argument, refuse to see is that the problem with Fausset’s piece wasn’t its assertion of the obvious fact of Nazi humanity; it was that it was about nothing else. It was myopic, and almost obsessive, about the details of an ordinary life to be found in the Nazi’s home; it lingered with fascination over his tattoos, his tastes in television, his shopping at Target.

Bauer insisted that the Times article served to inform, but beyond the banal details of its subject’s life it offers no facts and allows the Nazi to drive the narrative. What’s the Traditionalist Worker’s Party? Fausset quotes their own propaganda and moves on. Did they actually hold Appalachian food drives? No. But Fausset doesn’t challenge his subject on this assertion. Indeed, no fact checking of any Nazi assertion appears to occur. Fausset even left out the non-trivial detail of the man’s name, referring to him throughout as Tony Hovater, a pseudonym he uses for his white nationalist work. His real name is William Anthony Hovater. His wife was also interviewed under a pseudonym, yet this is never once mentioned to readers. So those like Bauer have to be asked: What, exactly, is a person unschooled in these issues meant to learn from an article that allowed Nazis to regurgitate propaganda from behind unmarked pseudonyms?

All context and factual information was shoved aside in favor of drooling fascination over the Nazi’s tastes and suburban lifestyle. And it’s that fascination which constitutes an enormous problem with the modern media — something that Bauer’s own Mother Jones has had issues with as well.

In short, the problem is one of framing and emphasis.

The problem with Fausset’s piece wasn’t its assertion of the obvious fact of Nazi humanity; it was that it was about nothing else.

It’s a fact that some Nazis have good manners and like binge-watching Netflix or eating with chopsticks. The problem is that the media lingers on those facts with an almost pornographic languidness, until they overwhelm every other fact about the person in a story that’s already too personal to begin with. White nationalism and its related forms of right-wing radicalization are a social, structural problem, wired into systems so vast that any narrow focus on one man, by definition, misses what’s most important.

So why the fixation? We can only be blunt here: white, middle class journalists appear to be at once frightened and fascinated by the apparent niceness of some Nazis and white nationalists. Fausset makes this plain with an exasperating question:

“Why did this man — intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases — gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?”

The implication, of course, is that an intelligible Nazi is one who is stupid, socially awkward, and dirt poor — a notion offensive to all three groups, I should add. But it betrays an unfathomable ignorance of history. The original Nazis, after all, counted aristocrats among their number and their sympathizers, and made quite a few businessmen rich through lavish support for corporations that still dominate the international landscape today (you may even use, ingest, or ride on their products).

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Fausset’s question is perhaps the only revealing thing in his Times Insider follow-up, for it shows the horrifying assumptions he made as he embarked on his reporting. Instead of pursuing a structural answer to his questions — by talking to the people most affected by Nazism, say, or doing a wider survey of experts who study and track right wing extremism, or examining the history of white nationalism in the Midwest — he started from the perspective of one man…and stayed there. What remains, then, is just an assemblage of banalities. Look at his cat. Look at his ink. Look at his wedding registry. Oh here’s some books on Holocaust denial. But also look at his Netflix queue.

This perspective — or, really, the lack of one — was satirized by James Hamblin to great effect in the Atlantic.

Whether journalists like Fausset and Bauer want to admit it or not, this fish-eye-lens perspective on Nazi banality, this utter fascination with it, communicates to white readers, “see, a Nazi is just like you, ergo maybe being a Nazi isn’t so bad; you can be a Nazi and be stylish and cool.”

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative

This is a message that the extreme right wants to send, they’ve said as much. Indeed, the Nazi interviewed in the original Times article said as much.

We already went through this with several wretched press cycles of “Newsflash: Richard Spencer Wears Necktie!” The obsession with manners and breeding, unto death, is nauseating, especially when you realize that getting the press to dance to that tune is a deliberate strategy of these Nazis. One tidbit in a news article about Spencer revealed that “[his] office appeared to be begging for respectability. At least five Spencer associates, all male, were hanging around the office, some dressed up. (A copy of Dressing the Man: The Art of Permanent Fashion sat on the coffee table.)” As an aside, this is how you use ordinary detail to tell the truth about these people. The detail of Spencer needing a silly how-to book in order to explain to his cronies how to button a shirt and don a blazer is almost slapstick comedy; by contextualizing it as “begging for respectability,” the journalist, Dana Liebelson, correctly identifies what the banal facts add up to.

It’s a matter of basic ethics. Ask yourself: Does your story coincide with Nazi propaganda? In Fausset’s case, the answer was clearly “yes.” As one historian pointed out, the Nazi interviewed by Fausset used a common bit of Nazi agitprop to explain his disgusting views on the Holocaust, placing blame on Heinrich Himmler for the executions while saying Hitler himself was “a rather chill guy.” Not only is this a common technique for legitimizing Holocaust denial, it’s one that’s advocated by neo-Nazi pseudo-historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, whose books adorn the shelves of Fausset’s subject, one of which appears in a photograph in the story. I can only imagine the Nazi paraphrasing that ridiculous ad campaign for Snowman, “Mister Journalist… I gave you all the clues.”

Ask yourself: Does your story coincide with Nazi propaganda? In Fausset’s case, the answer was clearly ‘yes.’

To be fair, Fausset does recognize that his subject is a Nazi, and even calls him a bigot. But the framing of the story, which emphasizes the man’s ordinariness to the exclusion of almost everything else, including all the context we need to understand racism and white nationalism in America, renders that moot. Contrary to Shane Bauer’s assertions, reporting like this doesn’t enhance understanding, it suffocates it in a confusing haze. What, after all, did we learn? This is not because reporting on the banality of evil is bad; indeed, it’s vital. But there’s a way of doing it well, and to do it well, one need only look to the woman who gave us the immortal phrase in the first place.

Emphasizing the ordinariness of evil can, sometimes, get you into trouble, yes. Ask Hannah Arendt. Her historic report for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel earned her the ire and enmity of countless individuals who felt that her “banality of evil” thesis, which held that Eichmann was a miserably ordinary man who nevertheless committed great evil, was morally exculpatory. It was a hard lesson to grapple with, especially with memories of the war and the Holocaust so fresh for so many — including Arendt herself, who spent years in a Nazi internment camp in Gurs, France.

Nevertheless, the report that became Eichmann in Jerusalem was notable for all the ways in which it was nothing like Fausset’s piece. Arendt focused on the manner in which Eichmann carried out his crimes, giving them center stage. She provided an explanation for his conversion to Nazism, explaining the mechanism by which mediocrity can lead to evil. Her contempt for him is transparently scathing. He is a “nobody,” and this seems to actually anger Arendt more than the notion of a towering devil directing those trains.

Emphasizing the ordinariness of evil can, sometimes, get you into trouble.

Eichmann was the archetypal bureaucrat “just following orders,” who oversaw the dispatching of trains across Europe that ferried millions to torturous deaths. Arendt, responding to more hand-wringing explanations for this kind of evil, calls the idea that “the Nazis had simply been lacking in human kindness” the “understatement of the century.”

Her closing words, spoken in the register of what she wished the judges had said, leave no doubt about her views on Eichmann: “We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life.” Still speaking as a judge, she concludes without mercy, “We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

For Arendt, while she emphasized that Eichmann was a nobody, and an archetypal bigoted little mediocrity, this was merely explanation, not absolution. Obedience to the law and support for it are functionally identical, she argues, and each must meet the same judgement. She was at pains to emphasize this point.

The Ethics Of Doxing Nazis

The Times’ Fausset, meanwhile, finds profundity in emptiness. “What causes a man to start fires?” he asks, quoting his punk song. “Who can say?” he seems to add, as if there is not an exhaustive, decades-old body of literature on fascism and the extreme right, as if the SPLC or Erich Fromm or Exit Deutschland or Hannah Arendt or the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies never existed.

Who can say? We can; we’ve said it many times over; we’ve said it for decades.

As much as men like Bauer want to defend limpid un-reporting like this as somehow vital, all it does is reveal a cavernous ignorance and an unwillingness to fill it. Perhaps because the answers are too scary to contemplate.

In a widely shared essay for the Atlantic, editor Adam Serwer tackles the related phenomenon of the mainstream press’ obsession with understanding the “white working class” who voted for Trump, while simultaneously trying to find redemptive humanity in them. Again, such stories state the obvious, but the emphasis and repetition is notable. In a damning paragraph, he lists how various white, putatively liberal/left journalists, leapt to condemn Hillary Clinton for her now infamous “basket of deplorables” remark:

Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson, in a since-deleted tweet, observed, “Clinton is talking about trump supporters the way trump talks about mexicans,” whom Trump derided as rapists and criminals. Bloomberg’s John Heilemann said, “This comment kind of gets very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted.” The leftist writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote on Facebook that Clinton was “an elitist snob who writes off about a quarter of the American electorate as pond scum.” As New York magazine’s Jesse Singal put it, “Not to be too cute but I have racist relatives. I’d like to think they aren’t ‘deplorable’ humans.”

As Serwer notes, balefully, the reason for this is obvious. For these people to have said anything else would’ve been to implicate themselves, and their loved ones. It would have, in short, implicated whiteness.

The fascination — and I must use that word to describe the phenomenon — with white nationalists who evince normal traits comes from fear of being implicated. Fear that, perhaps, good education and good manners are no defense against belief in the vilest forms of bigotry. Fear that they have the same potential in themselves, and that all white people are therefore — by dint of the drift of power and history in our society — vulnerable to this. They express shock, and that shock is worthy of entire articles themed around nothing but surprise at the fact that a Nazi knows how to tie a Windsor knot, because that sort of thing is supposed to be beyond racists. Perhaps, they fear, we could be racist too, and knowing how to use chopsticks won’t make it otherwise.

Perhaps, they fear, we could be racist too.

Fixation on the mundane both expresses that fear and suggests that there’s something redemptive in their shared (white) humanity. Stories about white nationalists who love “normal” superficial nonsense —Twin Peaks, blazers, XBox, wedding registries, a pet dog — suggest that one’s bourgeois norms are not actually a defense against fascism. As white journalists see, in terror, that these guys look like them, they don’t want to face up to what that means — so instead, they obsessively individualize the story.

In rereading some of Eichmann in Jerusalem for this essay I was struck by how Arendt’s tone would be considered verboten in this day and age. Her scalding observations left nowhere for Eichmann or his enablers to hide. She said he deserved death, even. All this after exhaustive reporting of facts from the trial that she assembled into a terrifying big picture. That so few journalists have the courage to write such analysis for our own time is dispiriting, to say the least. I can only close with another observation from Arendt:

“How troubled men of our time are by this question of judgement… What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Nov. 28, 2017, to reflect new information from this Splinter article.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-ethics-of-doxing-nazis-8e3d400d4619/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 22:49:50 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1921 Read more]]> These are dangerous people with poisonous ideas. But is it moral to release their identities to the world at large?

After Charlottesville, many people came to understand that white grievance didn’t just gestate beneath feminist or anti-racist articles; the terrifying fury of white men with too much free time didn’t merely throb and bubble in reddit. Instead, it lit up with tiki torches and took to American streets, crying for domination, yearning for others’ extermination.

Any pretense of protesting the removal of a statue was quickly blown out when Nazi chants, flags, and so on dominated every picture from the marches. It’s laughable that protesting the removal of a known racist Confederate general is not, in 2017, enough. No: Instead, in the reign of the sun-gazing President, the world needs Nazis and the KKK marching together, a malignant fraternity of toxic values.

What Really Happened In Charlottesville
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These are dangerous people with poisonous ideas. They want harm, division, hatred. These are not people with legitimate concerns, and it’s precisely this lack of legitimacy that helps fuel their rage. They camouflage their gradual reduction in entitlement to, well, everything, as some kind of rights violation.

They expect the world to still bend the knee, then express fear as we stand up as equals.

Regardless, the question I’m concerned with is whether or not it is ethical to release the identities of these people to the world at large.

“Effective Saturday 12th August, Cole White no longer works at Top Dog.” And so it was that a hot dog restaurant chain announced it would no longer employ a Nazi. And in so doing, it showed greater moral leadership than the President of the United States.

Mr. White (how appropriate) was one of several men identified by social media users as part of the Nazi marches at Charlottesville. Another man was publicly disowned by his family, after they discovered he intellectually masturbated to genocidal beliefs.

When ‘Free Speech’ Kills
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In an excellent article for Broadly, Steven Blum summarized a lot of the current doxing fears of white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Keegan Hankes told Blum: “It’s hard to get a job, hard to make a living, hard to have a normal social life when all your friends and family know you believe in ethnic cleansing.”

And this is where the moral issue lies. So let’s frame it:

If you know that by revealing a Nazi’s identity, you could cost them their job and their livelihood, expose them to threats, and so on, should you do so?

First, it’s important to clarify two terms: “doxing” and “Nazis.”

Doxing is revealing identifying information about someone on digital platforms — such as blogs or social media. This isn’t only about revealing the true identity behind a pseudonym or someone’s address. As the very smart Noah Berlatsky highlighted, the point isn’t whether data is private or public:

“the essence of doxing isn’t the privacy of the information. It’s how it’s used… Private information can lead to harassment. But public information can do the same thing.”

Berlatsky points out that many people list their names on social media spaces and those names can be traced fairly easily to, say, home addresses. What matters is putting disparate pieces of information together, under the banner of antagonism — regardless of whether that information was secret or just needed a quick Google search.

Second, by Nazis, I mean those who were waving Nazi flags and chanting Nazi slogans, yearning for racial murder and division. I’m also talking about all white supremacists, but Nazis are the most open, obvious example of a group worth opposing by almost anyone you’d probably meet. (Or so we thought, before too many white people began expressing hesitation at saying Nazis are the worst, including the President of the United States.)

There are some considerations to the main moral question to take in, before coming to *spoiler alert* an unsatisfying conclusion.

Mistakes

The main problem with any unauthorized administration of justice is that there are no rules, qualifications, or neutral observers to ascertain the veracity of an accused’s guilt. This means an accusation is sometimes sufficient reason to conclude guilt. Naturally, an accuser would have a barebones justification, such as a grainy picture contrasted with another linked to an identity. But this causes problems, especially in this age of social media and quickly shared images.

Kyle Quinn, an engineer whose life’s work is dedicated to saving lives, was misidentified as a Nazi marcher after Charlottesville. As the New York Timesreports:

“Mr. Quinn, who runs a laboratory dedicated to wound-healing research, was quickly flooded with vulgar messages on Twitter and Instagram, he said in an interview on Monday. Countless people he had never met demanded he lose his job, accused him of racism and posted his home address on social networks. Fearing for their safety, he and his wife stayed with a colleague this weekend.”

There were efforts in attempting to rectify the mistake, with people asking others to remove their tweets and posts identifying him. However, it was not nearly as successful as the initial spread.

This reveals a central risk with doxing: It’s much easier to spread information targeting someone than it is to fix a mistake. Information dispersed via rapid-fire social media sharing is often a case of toothpaste squeezing, as there’s no way to put it back. This is especially the case in emotionally charged scenarios, such as the threat of white supremacy.

The main problem with any unauthorized administration of justice is that there are no rules.
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It is precisely because of this heated passion, coupled with the inability to rectify mistakes, that the law operates on the basis of neutral judges and judicial procedures requiring sufficient evidence. Such mechanics simply are not part of doxing.

Of course, the most pertinent response is that Professor Quinn’s case is an outlier. There are more hits than misses when it comes to people being doxed, responders might claim. The other men who’ve lost their jobs, for example, indicate that the techniques, while not foolproof, are effective — if not veryeffective — in identifying the right people. Even proper administration of justice through police and court systems are not beyond reproach, weighed down by their own issues and often breaking the lives of many innocent people. Indeed, legal administration in the U.S. sometimes leads to innocents’ death, thanks to the death penalty in some parts of the country.

So You Want To Fight White Supremacy
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Furthermore, many who dox are aware of the dangers of mistakes. The question, then, is whether that means doxing should never occur or whether doxers should simply use better mechanisms when they dox. For example, instead of relying on their own judgement, doxers could have an informal collective that verifies their claims before posting. Fact-checking is always important, especially in situations that could put someone else at risk.

It’s hard to imagine doxers would disregard mistakes, since identifying the right person is the entire point behind doxing. Whether we agree with doxing or not, it’s safe to assume those who dox want accurate information, since they would lose credibility in their goals if they consistently had the wrong people. It’s in no one’s interest for doxing to fail.

However, this only brings us back around to the main question of whether doxing can ever be good.

The Power Of Fear

After writing an opinion piece about race in video games at the height of the Gamergate harassment campaign, my name spread through the various online channels that to this day generate abundant hatred. When obsessive trolls dug up my education history, going as far back as high school, it was frightening.

As noted above, the fact that all this is easy to find didn’t negate what it meant to see such information being distributed in circles obsessing over me and sending me death threats. It was more effective at instilling fear than any badly written threat or images of nooses I was being sent. The simple display of my schools, alongside fee amounts, rattled me more than most of what I’d received.

I’m hardly the only marginalized person who has been a victim of this tactic by those with more power. The internet has, to a large extent, been the great equalizer, as those in positions of privilege are forced to at least know of others’ concerns they otherwise could always ignore. But it’s also reinforced hatred that’s always been there.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
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This moral distinction is important; if doxing is going to be used, let it be used against those who want to see me and my loved ones dead, erased, undermined. As I pointed out in a post about punching Nazis, if we had to choose, I’d rather we had a world where Nazis were afraid rather than their targets. And, after all, doxed Nazis are more afraid of losing their jobs and social ostracism than anything.

I am, however, concerned that they will receive death threats, as often happens when one’s profile and identity is marked out online. Whether they are Nazis or not, I am uncomfortable with any mechanism that increases the chances and spread of death threats.

There is, however, another objective to doxing that is much easier to get behind.

Creating A Hostile Environment

Many view doxing as an effective mechanism for public shaming. It’s often written about in that context — but I think this misses the point.

Few of these doxed white supremacists were silent beforehand about views that are widely regarded to be noxious; if they were going to feel shame, they likely would’ve felt it already. It’s hard to see how anyone with enough Nazi conviction to willingly march with torches and reveal their face to numerous news media could be shamed into undoing their beliefs.

What doxing can do, however, is make the environment in which targets operate more hostile to their views.

We should want more environments to be hostile to Nazi beliefs.
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It’s problematic, of course, when this framework is applied to me and other marginalized people. My stalkers didn’t share details about my education to shame me for my anti-racism views or belief that marginalized people deserve justice; they did it to tell me they knew me, that they could see into parts of my life that were closer to home than a Twitter account or email.

But while it’s dangerous when those fighting for equality are subjected to such hostility, when applied to Nazis, this tactic becomes effective and even moral. Put simply, we should want more environments to be hostile to Nazi beliefs.

Again, this isn’t about shaming Nazis into disbelief (making them rethink their ideology would be great, too, but that’s not the immediate goal of doxing). This is about creating an awareness in them that their views are not welcome, that they are not welcome, while they chant about eradicating and seeing Jewish people, people of color, and so on vanish. Doxing appears highly effective at producing such an environment, as many white supremacists are conveying fear among themselves about it.

Nazis, It’s Time For A Common Sense Approach To Not Getting Punched
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So does that mean doxing suspected Nazis is always ethical? Not necessarily. And this is where that aforementioned unsatisfying conclusion comes in: I don’t know whether I support doxing and, even now, I am uncertain about whether it is a moral act. Doxing is, after all, imperfect, unregulated, and leads to false positives, and it can and has caused innocent people to fear for their lives.

That said, if it can be shown to have a significant effect on creating hostile environments to Nazis, with mechanisms for double checking to prevent mistakes and retraction upon mistakes’ occurrences, doxing could be a tool for those who feel powerless against a rising tide of white supremacy.

The ethics are complicated, as always, but I hope by engaging with the issue in a moral way, we gain clarity on these tools we use for justice — even while the world apparently turns to hot piss.

Every person who’s misused arguments for free speech to defend white supremacists has some of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

flickr / Henry Burrows

The way we were going, this was always going to end in blood. Every person who’s ever misused arguments for free speech to defend Nazis or white supremacists — just so they could puff out their chests and apocryphally quote Voltaire with smug certitude — has some measure of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

The road that James Alex Fields Jr. sped down was paved with countless editorials in major newspapers and magazines that positioned student movements or black women on Twitter as existential threats to “free speech.” It was paved by those who said they were less afraid of Richard Spencer than the man who punched him. It was paved by countless people saying, “they’re just words” or “it’s just the internet, it’s not real life” in defence of extremists’ vitriol, never realizing that such statements are not mere words on the wind: they are promises.

After all, how many times have we seen white people online call for mowing down protesters? What happened in Charlottesville wasn’t even the first time someone went out and actually did it. As a recent Slate article notes: “On July 10, 2016 — the same day a South Carolina fire captain threatened to run over BLM protesters who had shut down Interstate 126 — an SUV driver in southern Illinois plowed through a group of BLM protesters after yelling ‘All lives matter, not blacks, all lives.’”

That was over a year ago, and we should have seen then how hateful social media slogans quickly become action.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Heyer’s murder, a Springfield, MA policeman wrote on Facebook — in response to a news article about the terror attack — “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads.” He added, to someone trying to argue with him, “How do you know [the driver] was a Nazi scumbag? Stop being part of the problem.” An incredible two step: celebrating a woman’s murder, and then tut tutting someone who insulted her murderer while retreating behind formless relativism.

The many instances of whites letting loose their hatred online and calling for the mowing down of protesters are wishes being loosed into the ether. Eventually, they’ll coalesce into a deed. As I said, they are not just words, they are promises, given force and urgency by the overheated rhetoric that prevails on social media, where even the most extreme racists are given free reign to agitate without limit.

Years ago, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center made abundantly clear that hate sites like Stormfront were a common denominator for the spate of white nationalist terrorism we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic. The SPLC describes what should now be an all too familiar profile of an angry young white man with internet access:

“Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described ‘lone wolves,’ but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
And then he gets a gun.”

This was written in the days before GamerGate and the alt-right co-optation of 4chan, but the analysis readily applies to these larger, more easily accessible echo chambers, which have now claimed whole fiefdoms on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; their combined reach vastly outstrips that of the two decade-old Stormfront.

It was an important first step that GoDaddy and then Google booted the white supremacist Daily Stormer from their hosting services after the site’s role in radicalizing Fields — and celebrating his rampage — was made abundantly clear. That decisiveness was vital, and an even stiffer moral spine will be needed in the days and weeks to come. The time for pretending this group of white-right terrorists are playing the same game of democratic discourse was over decades ago, but some continue to refuse to wake up and acknowledge this reality.

Sacrificing Lives for Liberal Principle

In truth, we need to add the ACLU to this list of naysayers; they actually defended the Nazi and white supremacist mob, fighting the city of Charlottesville when they tried to move or cancel the march. Now, the rally they fought for — because of vague, abstract “free speech” principles grounded in a liberalism allergic to meaning — has claimed a life and seriously injured many others.

Liberals like Jonathan Chait, Jon Ronson, and Michelle Goldberg deserve their share of criticism for their spinelessness. Free speech absolutism originates, after all, from both Constitutional minimalism and a particular school of liberalism that sees principle as an end in itself — but there are leftists who are quite keen on the usual cliched arguments as well.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, defended the ACLU at length for their choice to defend both the extreme right troll Milo Yiannopoulos and the Charlottesville march. He likens us — those who openly criticize the reductive use of the Constitution to support hate crimes — to people who attack the ACLU for defending the civil liberties of terror suspects, or who attack the Council on American-Islamic Relations as “terrorists.”

Take note of the following, content-free argument I’m sure you’ve never heard before: “One of the defining attributes of fascism is forcible suppression of views.”

(Running over a young socialist woman does indeed suppress her views, but Greenwald is wringing his hands here for her murderers, keep in mind.)

Or this equally vacuous cliche:

“Is it not glaringly apparent that the exact opposite will happen: by turning them into free speech martyrs, you will do nothing but strengthen them and make them more sympathetic? Literally nothing has helped Yiannopoulos become a national cult figure more than the well-intentioned (but failed) efforts to deny him a platform.”

As someone who watched Yiannopoulos’ rise, I’ve borne witness to the fact that no one with any real power stood up to him and his abuses; this absence is what abetted his growing popularity. The passive permission granted to him by social media platforms, universities, and the press carried with it an imprimatur of approval and acceptability. The grating noise you heard was the sound of the Overton Window shifting.

Greenwald’s words are interchangeable with those of any number of liberals he otherwise abhors and disdains as warmongering crypto fascists — a fact I find darkly amusing. But he makes a more novel argument here that’s also worth quoting:

“It’s easy to be dismissive of this serious aspect of the debate if you’re some white American or non-Muslim American whose free speech is very unlikely to be depicted as ‘material support for terrorism’ or otherwise criminalized.”

This is as insulting as it is fantastical. Most of the noble warriors for abstract free speech I’ve encountered, who especially elevate the speech of Nazis and their ilk to prove their virtuous fealty to a principle, are white. In truth, it’s marginalized people, queer/trans people and women of color like myself, who often look askance at the tremendous amount of ink spilled by white men like Greenwald defending the untrammeled rights of people who A) say they want to kill us and take away our rights, and B) do so on a regular basis.

We don’t look at Nazis being too scared to march and think “there but for the grace of God go I,” but instead think, “good, I can breathe that much easier.”

His defense of the ACLU here also makes no note of how their Virginia chapter was apparently trolling the counter-protesters hours before Fields’ terror attack, snarkily pointing out how a black counter-protester was carrying a bow and arrow.

In addition to functionally narc’ing for the very police state Greenwald claims to abhor, it expresses the same tut tutting of our self-defense and political expression liberals love to indulge in. At the risk of stating the obvious, it wasn’t that counter-protester who ended up killing anyone; it was the ACLU’s client and object of Greenwald’s fetish principle.

There is a difference between defending the civil liberties of someone accused of terrorism (I have no doubt Fields, as a white man, will be accorded every democratic legal courtesy) and saying that a group of people who we know will likely be aggressively violent and bigoted should be permitted to congregate—with weapons—in a public square rich with targets.

Further, Greenwald’s direct comparison of the defense of Muslims (a vastly diverse group of 1.6 billion people who, in the West, comprise a religious minority routinely subject to discrimination and abuse) to the defense of Nazis (a discrete affinity group united by racial supremacism with murderous intent towards those self-same minorities), and the racism directed at the former to justifiable outrage at the latter, is completely obnoxious.

Much like his comparison between Nazis and left wing activists.

Since Greenwald is so eager to liken us to Dick Cheney, I might point out that this invidious equation of fascists, socialists, and communists is itself a popular right wing talking point. But one need only say this: there are many kinds of socialism and communism that are not Stalinism; there is no expression of fascism but Hitlerism. We can and should be able to make moral judgements accordingly.

Our deaths — the deaths of trans folks, POC, and members of other marginalized communities — are the true content of Nazi, white supremacist, and neo-Confederate speech. Their rallies are “peaceful” in the way Richard Spencer’s promise of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” is peaceful.

Contrary to Greenwald’s bizarre fantasy about how all non-whites agree with his absolutism, we understand that reality and organize around it. Securing unlimited rights for Nazis does not guarantee my rights; it forfeits them. Bear in mind who Fields targeted with his car: a group of protesters, many of whom were women and people of colour carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs.

There are many kinds of socialism and communism that are not Stalinism; there is no expression of fascism but Hitlerism.

As I was at pains to point out months ago, this vision of untroubled free speech always runs afoul of the fact that there are rights conflicts in any democracy. No one person can have unlimited rights, lest they inevitably interfere with the rights of others. In this case, the privileged indulgence in the rights of Charlottesville’s Nazi marchers conflicted quite directly with the right to life putatively enjoyed by the counter-protesters (who all comprise direct targets of Nazi violence).

What Liberals Don’t Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump

How many of us must die before liberal and left wing white men realize that they’re not the ones being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice so they can hold on to a parlor game principle? Why do they not see that the “free speech” argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?

Jeremy Christian, who murdered two men on a light rail train in Portland, OR, reportedly said “Get stabbed in your neck if you hate free speech” to police, days after attending a “free speech rally” in the city that hosted extreme right wing groups. These people are adopting this term for a reason. When we use “free speech” as moral spackle to cover up the true content of these people’s’ beliefs and deeds, they will take that as a cue and use it accordingly.

This nonsense will keep getting people killed until we grow up as a society and accept that we can make decisive moral judgements about speech acts. Taking action against Nazis is not a slippery slope; it’s a sticky floor. It is the ethical ground on which we must stand in order to take our bearings.

A Foolish Consistency

The catastrophic failure of mealy mouthed “both sides”-ism, which Greenwald’s editorial is but the liberal version of, was revealed this week when Trump’s initial condemnation only blamed nameless “many sides” for violence that had a single source.

To look at how white supremacists, neo-Confederates, and Nazis cheered on that statement, even though it (in some vague, abstract way) condemned them, is instructive. It tells you how and why they thrive on moral ambiguity and relativism, why condemning “both sides” is illusory in its fairness and how it actually emboldens the true culprits by enabling them to skulk in the shadows of namelessness.

Why do they not see that the “free speech” argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?

One of the last social media posts that Heather Heyer made was the popular slogan “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Her final act was to march with Black Lives Matter protesters and members of the local DSA chapter — which has fundraised a storm for Heyer and her family. Meanwhile ten others remain in hospital, like Natalie Romero, a Latina student at UVA who joined the counterprotest.

It didn’t have to come to this.

But every inch of permission granted by our liberal thought-leaders, and the leftists who’ve abetted their arguments, every bit of digital earth ceded by Twitter, Google, and Facebook, every “it’s the principle of the thing!” argument made by well-meaning whites in defense of our would-be assassins, brought us closer and closer to the point where Charlottesville was inevitable.

As so many of us pointed out, the Klansmen, Nazis, and neo-Confederates were marching en masse in broad daylight without hoods or masks. That boldness has its origins in the permission granted by powerful institutions and prominent commentators who said the “marketplace of ideas” would crush Nazism, in Twitter’s ongoing failure to stamp out the Nazi presence on the platform, in the excuses made by liberal/left commentators eager to score easy points off of student activists rather than do the hard work needed to fight an actual threat to freedom.

All this in the name of that foolish consistency that Emerson excoriated so long ago, as if discernment were not also a moral and intellectual skill.

I could say “the time for illusions is over” or some such thing, but people of color have been dying for decades so that people like Greenwald or Chait could cling to a fantasy of “free speech” that never includes us when we need it most, that privileges the speech rights of our murderers over our right to live. It needs to stop now.

I am not the price to be paid for the hobgoblin of your consistent arguments.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/so-you-want-to-fight-white-supremacy-2b5735f22f9/ Tue, 15 Aug 2017 03:17:26 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3405 Read more]]> There is no excuse and no negotiation to be had: We all must battle this violent, deadly system.

Hello fellow outraged human being. I am sure that the events of these last few days — the marching of young white supremacists through the UVA campus, and the assault and murder of anti-racist protesters, has left many of you shocked and horrified. Violent white supremacy is a shocking thing to see in action—and all white supremacy is violent.

If you are one of the many who are now saying, “This has gone too far, what can I do?” If you have the strong suspicion that counter-marches aren’t quite enough, but you don’t know where to take it from there, I’m here to help. Here are some things you may need to know first:

White supremacy is not just about the hateful actions of individuals or groups of individuals.

White supremacy is first and foremost a system. A system which puts the belief that white people are superior to other races into practice. It is this system that makes white supremacy as dangerous as it is, and it kills people much more violently and with more frequency than we’ve seen this past weekend in Virginia.

White supremacy is in our workplace, our school system, our government and our prisons. It is in our books and movies and television. White supremacy has been woven into the fabric of our nation from the moment that white settlers decided that their claim to land was more important than the lives of indigenous people. This is not a new problem. This is America.

This is not a new problem. This is America.
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The white supremacy we are seeing in the streets right now is not just Nazism, and to label it as such is erasive.

Yes, there are definitely neo-Nazis marching among the ranks of the White Supremacists who have been on the rise since the election of Obama made white people fear for their status in society for the first time in decades. These white supremacists draw a lot of inspiration from Hitler and the monstrous acts that Nazis committed. It is very tempting, then, especially with the general consensus among all decent people that Nazis are indeed a serious threat that must be taken seriously, to label all of these white supremacists Nazis. But Nazism is a distinct political ideology with a distinct history and actions. Further, when we think about the targets of Nazis, we think primarily of only one group: Jewish people.

Anti-Semitism has indeed been on the rise in recent years, and many of these newer white supremacists have used the hatred of Jewish people, and the imagery of Nazism, as a rallying point. The evocation of the historical trauma of the Holocaust is a tactic meant to shock everyone, make white supremacists feel powerful, and terrify Jewish people (although Jewish people certainly were not the only groups targeted by Nazis — Roma, homosexuals, disabled people and many others were murdered — , the targeting of Jewish people has been primarily how many Americans think of the Holocaust). But this hatred we are seeing marching through the UVA campus was not born in Germany. It is a home-grown problem. The United States has a long history of anti-Semitism, and while the imagery and swastikas may be borrowed from Germany’s past, this hatred is all-American. If we want to battle anti-Semitism in America, we must look at it as an American problem in the context of American history.

White People: I Want You To Understand Yourselves Better
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Further, today’s white supremacy has, as it always has, deep roots in this country’s hatred of non-white people — especially black Americans. It is important to remember that it was the fear of the rise of black Americans after the election of Obama that started the rise of violent white supremacy we are seeing today. Much of the recruitment points into this latest incarnation of white supremacy are the same as they have always been: the fear of the black brute coming for white women, “black-on-black crime,” the fear of white erasure and the devaluation of the white male through miscegenation, the fear of the loss of status, power, and resources to “inferior” blacks.

Our country’s entire social, political, and economic system is built off of the promise that poor and working class whites would always get more than everyone else — that they deserved more than everyone else. When the profits of white supremacy prove to be meager, because capitalism will always send the spoils to the top few, the anger of being cheated out of their just rewards is easily funneled into racist hate.

This hatred we are seeing marching through the UVA campus was not born in Germany. It is a homegrown problem.
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Today, that racist hate has plenty of targets: black people, Muslim people (yes, this is racist in its roots), Jewish people (who become not-white when it suits the needs of white supremacists), Latinx people, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans. To just label them Nazis not only erases the impact that these white supremacists have on non-Jews, it also points us to the wrong cause and, likely, the wrong solutions. It allows the majority of Americans to separate themselves from the problem and say, “these people are not us.” But they are “us,” because they are a product of the system that every person in this country with white privilege helps maintain. I know that sounds harsh; it sounds like I’m painting the majority of Americans with a broad brush, but the system of white supremacy does not care about your intentions, it does not care if you do or do not hold hatred for people of color in your heart—it only cares that you participate in the system.

So, now that we’ve established that white supremacy is not as simple as a group of marching, angry white people—that white supremacy is literally the air that we breathe—it seems daunting, hopeless, even, doesn’t it? But in fact, the opposite is true. You can spend the rest of your life fighting to win over the hearts of white supremacists one at a time, and if you won over one a week even, you would, at the end of your life, have not made a measurable dent in white supremacy. But systems, systems we can change. Remember, it was the threat to the system of white supremacy symbolized in the election of Barack Obama that so terrified white Americans. It was the thought that the levers needed to reduce the structural power of white supremacy were within the reach of non-white hands.

Because we all interact with the system of white supremacy, because we all uphold it to some degree — we all have some power to tear it down. And while discussions of white privilege can make many white people want to plug their ears in order to keep the shame of their participation in the oppression of others at bay, acknowledgement of that privilege is also the key to finding the places where you can make the most impact in fighting white supremacy.

The truth is: You’ve been trusted with the keys to the car, people of color haven’t — so, maybe you should take the wheel and make a hard left.

There are countless opportunities every day to disrupt white supremacy — especially if you are white. If you need inspiration, here are a few ideas:

Schools.

The racist mythology needed to morally justify white supremacy is disseminated first and foremost through schools. Do you know what is in your children’s textbooks? How is slavery being taught? How is the Civil War discussed? What conversations are had in class around Thanksgiving or Columbus Day? At what age are your children learning about the Japanese internment camps — if at all? What black history is being taught outside of black history month? Are any of the explorers, scientists, politicians, or artists lauded in class Latinx, Asian American, or Native American? Is the hatred and violence perpetrated against Muslim Americans and people of South Asian descent since 9/11 discussed?

Outside of texts, what is the racial makeup of your school board and school staff? How many children of color are suspended and expelled from your local schools? How does your school address racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic bullying? Is your district outsourcing its discipline to anti-black police forces?

The system of white supremacy does not care about your intentions, it does not care if you do or do not hold hatred for people of color in your heart—it only cares that you participate in the system.
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Work.

What diversity recruitment efforts does your company have? How does HR handle reports of racial discrimination? Are your work social events diverse and inclusive? Who is getting promoted? Who gets to speak in meetings? What racial equity goals are written into your union charter? Ask these questions, and get your coworkers to ask as well. If you are white, do not leave the burden on the few people of color in the office to advocate for themselves in a system that has already shown it values their voices less than yours.

Money.

Are you supporting minority-owned businesses? Are you boycotting businesses that discriminate against people of color — not only through how they treat customers of color, but in the products they choose to carry, the politics they support, and the way they treat their employees of color? Are you donating to progressive political candidates of color? Are you supporting anti-racist activist groups, civil rights organizations, and immigrant advocacy groups? Are you voting for taxes and levies that empower and enrich communities of color? Are you seeing movies with diverse casts and shunning those that prefer to imagine an all-white world? Are you buying art from artists of color and rejecting the appropriation of that art by white artists?

When I Said All Trump Supporters Are White Supremacists, I Meant It
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Politics.

Are you voting in local elections, where your vote has the most power? Are you asking your mayor and city council about their police oversight and reform goals? Are you demanding that racial equity be a real and actionable goal of any candidate who gets your vote? Are you asking for city and state funds to go to projects to support communities of color? Are you voting for candidates of color? Are you paying attention to which judges and prosecutors will be granted the authority to decide the fate of the millions of black and brown adolescents and adults trapped in our racist criminal justice system?

Family.

If you are white, and your children are white, are you explaining white privilege to them? Are you introducing your children to cultures other than their own? Are the only people you have over for dinner white? Are all their dolls and action figures white? Are the characters in their story books and favorite movies all white? Are you children being taught to stand up for their friends of color and always speak out against racist bullying? Are you trusting in your children’s ability to handle some truth about racism in America — a truth that children of color never get the chance to avoid? Are you having tough conversation with your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles? Are you letting family members know that their racist speech is a personal affront to you? Are you making anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia, and the fight against anti-Semitism a family value?

Are you trusting in your children’s ability to handle some truth about racism in America — a truth that children of color never get the chance to avoid?
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Socially.

White people, are you listening, without ego and defensiveness to people of color? How many of your good friends are not white? Do your friends of color feel comfortable telling you when you are being racist? When with other white people, what jokes are you letting slide in order to not make waves? What racist comment are you cringing at but choosing to ignore? In what ways are you helping to make white supremacists feel comfortable in their bigotry, in order to not make yourself uncomfortable as well? What friendships are you risking in order to help make your racist friends better people and to help make your friends of color more safe? How are you fighting the normalization of racism and bigotry in everyday life?

As you can see from this small example, there are a lot of ways in which you can fight white supremacy every single day. And now that you know that you can, you absolutely must. There is no excuse and no negotiation to be had. The fight against white supremacy is both arduous and urgent, thankless and endlessly rewarding, because people are being crushed by this white supremacist system every single day and every step we take will always be not enough—but still absolutely vital.

Those of us targeted by white supremacy do not get a moment’s rest — and if you are not targeted by white supremacy, that should keep you up nights as well. Do not give up, do not rest, until the system of white supremacy is reduced to rubble. You may not see it in your lifetime, but your efforts will help ensure that many more of us will live long enough to do our part.

Let me start off by saying that nobody wants Nazis to get punched in the face, and having a Nazi bleed profusely all over a public sidewalk as the result of an unexpectedly inflicted head wound is not something any decent person would condone. Punching Nazis simply because you disagree with their plan to execute a mass genocide is reprehensible and inexcusable.

But this isn’t a perfect world, it’s the real world. And Nazis should consider taking some common-sense steps to avoid being punched in the face, such as never doing or saying anything that would lead anyone on earth at any time for any reason to believe that they are Nazis.

Of course, it’s not fair that Nazis should have to change anything about their behavior or beliefs just to avoid being punched in the face, but if I knew a Nazi personally, I would hope they would heed this advice. You wouldn’t leave an expensive watch sitting on your driver’s seat and abandon your car, unlocked, on a dark street, would you? And then come up shocked to find the watch gone and your car vandalized? I mean, you can’t go around doing, saying, and believing racist things—like quoting Nazi propaganda and Hitler himself—and then express surprise when someone clocks you in the gourd for it. Not that there is anything inherently unconscionable with doing, saying, and believing racist things!

You can’t go around doing, saying, and believing racist things, and then expressing surprise when someone clocks you in the gourd for it.
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For their own safety, Nazis must consider not being unapologetic racists as a means of reducing their risk of getting punched in the face. To be sure, no one should ever have to hide their fundamentally eugenicist philosophy from the world, and certainly Nazis, as much as anyone else, deserve to publicly espouse their belief in the essential inferiority of people of color, Jews, LGBTQ people, the mentally ill, and other non-white, non-able-bodied members of the population whom they intend to kill en masse, like they did during World War II, at the first opportunity without worrying about being punched in the face.

I’m just trying to be realistic. Naturally we’d all prefer for Nazis to be able to do Nazi stuff and be Nazis without suffering any repercussions whatsoever, forever, for the entirety of their lives, for any reason.

In a perfect world, Nazis would be able to walk around espousing genocide as a means of achieving their goal of purifying the human race without fear of being punched in their faces. Nobody wants Nazis to be free to execute their racist extermination plan more than I do! I’m just asking questions: Maybe if Nazis weren’t so into that whole racial-exceptionalism-as-a-justification-for-murder thing, they’d get punched in the face a little less often.

I’m not trying to tell Nazis how to live their lives; I just want Nazis to realize the risk they’re taking when they do and say the racist things that no one should ever punch them in the face for doing and saying. Until the day Nazis can act with the full support of a racist right-wing government behind them in this country, they should mind what they do, how they talk, and where they wear those swastikas.