Donald Trump, Justice, Racism

White Terrorists Are Not The Problem, Intellectuals Who Give Them Aid And Comfort Are

The violence is the tip of the spear, I'm more worried about the shaft.

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Tiki torches are the perfect symbol for the alt-right intellectual: dim, ubiquitous, and actual fire contained in a seemingly benign package.

James Alex Fields Jr., the white supremacist accused of ramming his car into an anti-hate protest and killing Heather Heyer, was arraigned this morning. He did not enter a plea. Legally, he’s an easy scapegoat for the terror visited upon Charlottesville this weekend. He used a conventional weapon, his vehicle, to promote hate. We have a system to deal with that.

The violent people are just the tip of the spear: painful, but largely ineffectual without the speed and power generated by the trash intellectuals who make up the seemingly benign shaft.

The law can confiscate and incarcerate all the spear points in the world, but it’s powerless to do anything about the shafts. The shafts are protected, not by the Second Amendment, but by the First. And the white supremacists hiding in plain sight know that and celebrate that and dare you to challenge them. When you do, they slither up their free-speech crosses and claim the “high ground.”

Only ostracism, not government regulation, can figuratively hack these people down from their perches.

Today, I’m wholly unconcerned with what Donald Trump has to say about the situation he himself helped create (he condemned racism today, whoopie). I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what Jeff Sessions, white supremacy’s chief legal strategist, has to say.

But I wonder what, if anything, the University of Tennessee College of Law will have to say today. Those guys employ a law professor who suggested performing exactly the kind of attack allegedly carried out by James Fields. Last September, conservative blogger and Tennessee Law professor Glenn Reynolds retweeted a story about protesters blocking motorists and said that drivers should “run them down.” He claims he was telling the drivers to do this in self-defense, as if that makes it better somehow.

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Reynolds was briefly suspended by Tennessee Law,[CORRECTION: Reynolds was not suspended or punished by UT Law; he was suspended briefly by USA Today, where he writes a column. I wish-remembered a whole minor punishment that didn’t even happen. My bad.], and had his Twitter account blocked until he deleted the tweet. Much hand-wringing was done by the conservative crowd for slapping one of their keyboard heroes on the wrist for advocating vehicular homicide.

But both of the suspensions were temporary. Reynolds is back up on the Tennessee Law website, with the standard breathlessly positive bio. And his popular Twitter account, @instapundit, has been at it all weekend: from the looks of it, the only thing that was attacked this weekend was somebody named “Speech,” and the only conservative is Sean Spicer.

I’m not the only one noticing the connection between this weekend’s attacks and Reynolds. Charlie Pierce called Reynolds out by name in Esquire, yesterday. When somebody does exactly what you’ve suggested should be done, people notice.

Is it a connection Tennessee Law notices, or cares about?

You can’t arrest people like Glenn Reynolds. That would be fascism. But when you give him — and the thousand of others like him — aid and comfort, you’re helping them create the intellectual cover for white supremacy. The alt-right didn’t come “out of nowhere.” They’re not operating out of a camp out in the woods. They are not a few guys willing to kill, they are a legion eager to justify the white man’s place of military, economic, and cultural dominance.

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That’s why focusing on the few eruptions of actual violence kind of misses the point. What’s changing America is not the application of white supremacy at the fringes: any African-American can tell you that white people have been willing to kill to protect their status for 400 years. That’s as American as apple pie.

No, the change that we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes is the acceptance of white supremacy as a mainstream idea. It’s been 100 years since the last time it was okay for an American president to be as openly racist as Donald Trump is. With better blood pressure medication, Woodrow Wilson could be re-elected today.

We are where we are not because conservative bloggers have a right to say “run them down”; of course they have that right, and they can’t be jailed for saying it. We are not here because some idiots will actually run over protesters with their cars; of course that is illegal, and they’ll most likely be jailed for doing it.

We are here because people who do not believe themselves to be “white supremacists” treat the Glenn Reynoldses of the world as “normal” people. Some even treat them with “respect.”

You have to invite the devils inside. Acting horrified when they raid your tiki-torch supply is a little late.

Earlier:

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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