Matthew Barlow

Donald Trump is the first man elected President of the United States with the support of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups since, well, before the Civil War (Andrew Johnson was elected Vice-President, but he did so as Lincoln’s junior partner and after taking a hard-line against Confederates, which he later walked away from). I refuse to call these people the alt-right. They’re not. They’re white supremacists.

But in the wake of Trump’s election, the media has been bending and tripping over itself to normalize white supremacy.  Perhaps those in the media behind this would claim that they’re just attempting to understand.  But there is nothing to understand. White supremacy is pretty bloody obvious.  There is no need to explain it differently, it is deeply offensive to let members attempt to explain themselves and argue for the justness of their cause in public.  There is no justness of their cause.

I came of age in the early 90s, when racist skinheads could still be found wandering around Canadian cities like Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal.  There, they beat on black people, harassed and intimidated non-white people, targeted LGBTQ people.  Violently.  And since that era, white supremacy has faded into the background, usually affiliated with violent racist fringe groups.

Until now.  President-Elect Trump has appointed Steve Bannon, an anti-Semitic, misogynist white supremacist as his Chief Counsel.  And much of the so-called liberal media in the United States has attempted to normalize it, like this is just a run-of-the-mill appointment.

But it gets worse.  Starting the morning after the election, on November 10, NPR was interviewing white supremacists on Morning Edition, as if that was to be expected.  The New York Times has alternated between shaming the incoming administration for its ties to white supremacists and normalizing those same ties.  The BBC has allowed the editor of The Weekly Standard, a deeply conservative, and apparently racist, publication, onto its set to claim that the KKK does not exist and, moreover, even if it did, to compare it with the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.  Nearly every media platform I consume has had some commentary from David Duke crowing about how happy he is.  And CNN had a man on last week asking whether or not Jews are people.  I refuse to provide links to this.  Search them yourselves if you want to see/read.

This is disgraceful.  This is giving screen-time to white supremacists, it is making them acceptable members of the body politic. It is allowing white supremacy to gain a beach head in the mainstream.  This is wrong.  So very wrong.  None of these clowns deserve support, or attention.  There’s a reason they were almost personae non gratae in the mainstream for the past two-plus decades: they’re extremists.  And watching the media feed these trolls is nauseating.