Given that the current occupant of the White House has declared loudly and frequently that he only likes winners, one has to wonder what he sees in some of the groups who supported him so strongly during his run for the presidency and who now claim their votes put him into office.
Let’s take a moment to recap what these white racist groups admire the most. For starts, they claim to want to take America back while defending and adulating a country – the Confederate States of America – that fought a war to separate from America. The Confederate flag represents an enemy combatant. Hero worship of Robert E Lee is the same as hero worship of Gitmo prisoners. They all are guilty of trying to destroy our country.
Then they throw out the stiff armed Nazi salute – a salute that belongs to a regime that tried to conquer the world and exterminate an entire race of people and, oh yeah, they lost too.
So it seems that white supremacists admire losers, which makes sense when you consider that most of them are. But how does the current White House chief occupant handle the disconnect between his avowed distaste for losers and his love of their support?
Both the Nazis and the Confederate States of America represented a threat to the overall well being of the countries they inhabited. The threat was neutralized when they lost their war. That is, it was neutralized until, in some pact with the devil, white supremacists in the United States decided to start flying the Confederate flag and giving us the Nazi salute as their way of showing their superiority to all other races and ideas. But again, the question must be asked, if they are so superior, why are they idolizing losers?
I find the concept of put upon white males in America rather amusing. If you look at the picture of the current occupant of the White House’s Cabinet, they certainly seem well represented. If you look at a picture of the US Congress, they certainly seem to have the majority. If you look at boardrooms across the country, you could be blinded by the male whiteness.
A friend of mine recently related a story about a dinner party she threw in which a couple of white men spent most of the main course commiserating with each other over just how marginalized white men are in today’s America. The “woe is me” stench pervaded the entire meal. After listening for as long as she could to this blather about the way white men in America have the deck stacked against them, she stood up and asked them both a very simple question. She asked, “If being a white man in today’s America is so horrible, exactly what color would you have preferred to be born?” Her question was met with dead silence.
When the idiots and haters who lead organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and other rightwing neo-Nazi groups declare that they are taking back America, I have to wonder who they are taking it back from. White men already occupy almost all positions of power on the local, state and national level. They run the military. They control the largest corporations. They are the least likely to be stopped by a cop for the audacious act of driving their car. They are less likely to be jailed for selling or making drugs.
The majority of white men in America are not part of hate groups. In fact, most are caring individuals who would never want to see anyone left out of the promise of America based on their skin color, language, culture or religion. Unfortunately, the overwhelming white maleness of America’s terror groups, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Neo Nazis, has the potential to smear all white men with the same brush. Hmm… I guess that means that white American men and Muslims have a lot in common – they both are in danger of being unfairly connected to hate groups to which they have no actual connection.
Despite the fact that the majority of the acts of terrorism that have occurred in this country since 9/11 have been the product of homegrown white male terrorists, our country still seems to be focused on some outside force as the one we should fear. In fact, we should fear most those men who look the most like us. For some reason, they seem the most determined to kill and maim on domestic soil.
Maybe we should be considering a quota for how many white men are allowed to be in America on any given day and not worry about the refugees. Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan definitely seem more dangerous to our health, our way of life and our beliefs.