The New Recalibration
Check your math, kids
You know a podcast has gone well when after recording you and the other person keep talking, as was the case last week with Meghan Daum, for an upcoming episode of her podcast, The Unspeakable. I’d fan-girled over Meghan for more than a decade before meeting her in 2018, at a dinner that included Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles (then both at the NYT), Alana Newhouse of Tablet, and Joanna Andreasson of Reason; you can imagine the talk-talk at the table.
“I guess my ultimate question is: What do you say to the person who says, ‘Yeah, Antifa is annoying, but to suggest that they even approach the threat level of white nationalists is naïve at best’,” Meghan emailed after we’d taped. “(Full disclosure: someone said this to me yesterday.) ‘You’ve got Proud Boys marching in Seattle with automatic rifles. You’ve got guys with swastikas and tiki torches marching in Charlottesville.’ And when I say, ‘Yeah, but how many of those tiki guys were there, really? Two thousand seems like a lot but two thousand is also kind of nothing…”
About those rifles (which were probably semi-automatic): they are increasingly not the dominion only of the right, which we saw at the Red House confrontation in Portland earlier this month, and which I saw when following activists the day after the election:
“Check it out,” my friend says, as a guy playing a banjo and his friend pass. They are each carrying rifles, not the usual M.O. of the antifa/BLM crew. Maybe I am wrong about their being unwilling to try anything new. Later, these two will tell me that they are here to protect people; that the other side—meaning, in their telling, the Proud Boys, though there do not appear to be any Proud Boys around tonight—have guns and they need to, too.
“We've started carrying in Portland and overall, we've gotten a great reception,” says banjo player, who hands his rifle to another friend so he can strum a few chords. “It's nothing to be ashamed of, also, not everyone should do it. As long as you're cool-headed and know what you're doing.”
I had no reason to not trust that these guys would remain cool-headed. Maybe they realized they’d need to, what with those they were ostensibly protecting flitting about like larks, smashing storefronts and yelling “YOU SUCK!” in the faces of National Guard soldiers without any visible care of consequence.
But to address Meghan’s question, from my little patch of earth: In September, Oregon governor Kate Brown declared a state of emergency, in anticipation of a rally where it was feared 10,000 Proud Boys would show up. About 200 came. There was one heavily streamed incident of violence, a drunk guy (unaffiliated with the Proud Boys) pushing a photographer to the ground and kicking the camera out of his hand. It was a dumb-ass and vile move. What is was not, no matter how many times activists tweeted that it was, was the photographer being kicked in the head and suffering a brain injury.
I do not know how many white supremacists there are in this country. I’m not sure anyone reliably can know, not when there’s a willingness and even the mandate to play with the numbers. I can appreciate that there is frisson in anticipating that 10,000 Proud Boys are about to march on the city, and that maybe that feeling is animating, is useful. But what is it based on? The governor’s alarm? A fetish to find the worst in our fellow man? The endless and endemic labor being put into feeding the image of white supremacy, no wonder that it grows monstrous and incandescent. How can it not, with people working like minions to shove in as many as possible of what Kmele Foster, on the most recent Patreon episode of the Fifth Column podcast, called “the narratives you have clunking around in your stupid little head.”
These narratives, with variation, are predicated on anything white being to blame for anything bad. I phrase that in dumb terms because it is dumb, the reductionist thinking of the ideologue. As a journalist, I am intolerant of trimming the facts to fit the theory, sure, but more than this, I’m gobsmacked at how people will take whatever it is that makes them squirm, makes them nervous, makes them afraid or livid or sad, and manipulate it into The New Recalibration, one that achieves parity or gets them off the hook or has them gleam in the eyes of others or – and this is the big one – makes them invisible, a play to fade into the wallpaper. I get that people are afraid of being called racist (while positing that they really, really need to get over that; as I’ve said before, you can tell me I’m a 7’2” Croatian, but what does that have to do with me?) and so go along with anything that offers cover, they hang the greengrocer sign, they list the pronouns, they sign the petition, they look the other way (they have a family, after all; they have a job) when things are beyond ludicrous, things you should be laughing at, and sometimes do laugh at, but sometimes don’t because they’re also so terrible.
“Are you against racism and what would be your statement thereof?” Matt Welch, tongue planted in cheeky cheek, asked Kmele on the Patreon.
“Yeah, fuck racism, I’m against it, especially anti-racism. Really against that,” Kmele responded. “You know, I realized I still have not figured out how to properly articulate how maddening it is to see the Black Lives Matter slogan every place, and the weird emotions I feel when I encounter some random person who’s wearing one of those shirts or hats… or people scrawling it on white surgical masks in Brooklyn; just awful. It’s genuinely infuriating to encounter that shit – and I know that it comes from a good place, that most of these people think they’re doing a good thing. But they can’t really imagine just how kind of gross it is to be imagined as this destitute figure who’s desperately in need of your assistance and help at all times in all things.”
But it has to be that way, right? Or The New Recalibration falls apart. Which, in people’s heart of hearts, and also maybe when the door’s closed, it does all the time. Because people are not the little plastic playthings you make of them; it’s not up to you to bend others to your theory so you can be the do-gooder, or the whipping boy, or the shiny-shiny face of progress.
Back to Meghan’s question, of whether white supremacy is overwhelmingly to blame for the acts of violence we see in this country, as exemplified by what happened on the streets of Portland in 2020.
Of the 200+ nights of mayhem from May through December, and by my granted not very exact count, right-wing forces rolled into the area four times to confront Antifa/black bloc/BLM protesters. That's 2% of the time. The number of nights that included, all or in part, breaking windows, throwing excrement, threatening people not deemed for the cause, and waking up sleeping Portlanders by marching down residential streets shouting, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up motherfucker, wake up!”? Every night, sluiced along by a narrative that saw the activists as blameless, as fighting for a better world, as doing what their parents at their age did or maybe wanted to do but didn’t have the leeway or stomach to.
“We saw them from our upstairs window marching up N. Denver back to Kenton Park. They were drumming and chanting. They sounded joyful,” a woman wrote on a Nextdoor.com thread; this, days after these same activists had burnt down a week-old street plaza blocks from her home. “I have to say they brought tears to my eyes. I was proud of them. Keep up the nonviolent protests, young folks!”
I mean, what do you say? Also, to the young woman who, after I asked why she was attacking the federal courthouse, screamed, “The Portland police are murdering all our black friends!” I did not tell her that there had been one fatal police shooting in Portland that year, and that the victim had been white, but if I had, I wonder if she would have taken the chance to believe me.
Sometimes chance is imposed. After Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson was shot and killed by self-proclaimed Antifa/BLM supporter Michael Reinoehl, I sensed, if not reflection, then a pause. The murder made a mess of the going narrative, one that only got messier after Reinoehl was shot and killed by law enforcement agents. I wrote about how the murders were a Rorschach test, but maybe I was wrong there; maybe people avoided looking too closely at this story because it overcomplicated the picture and showed we had imperfectly cast the hero’s role.
Can I say with absolute certainty that white supremacist groups are not the main perpetrators of violent attacks in this country? No, only that judging from my little patch of earth, they have not been. I am prepared to learn stats that show otherwise, against which I will balance the 10,000 becoming 200, the kicked camera advancing to brain injury.
Hey Nancy?
Yes?
How about something a little lighter on a Tuesday morning?
Got it! Here’s Bill Schulz of Compound Media’s Mornin’!!! show and I from Christmas past and maybe New Year’s future, if Matt Welch and I can get the Paloma Media studio built chop-chop! Will you be invited? Come on…
