Calling a Spade a Nazi

There's been a recent and inexplicable resurgence in media dilly-dallying as writers/news commentators across the land have heralded the age of the new "alt-right" movement. First of all: you're late to the party. When you have a room full of people "sig heil"-ing to Donald "Don't Call Me Responsible" Trump, it's pretty clear that whatever white nationalism is currently boiling to the surface, has been around for some time now, festering in a collective and racist hatred for Barack Obama and his ilk.

But instead of calling it what it is, media outlets have resorted to mumbling "alt-right," in lieu of the more incendiary (but accurate) titles: white nationalists, Nazis, racists, bigots and Hitler fanboys. Granted, there is a movement currently happening to change that, led in part by ThinkProgress who has publicly denounced the use of the term alt-right and will no longer refer to it on their site, except in quotation.

The point here is not to call people names, but simply to describe them as they are. We won’t do racists’ public relations work for them. Nor should other news outlets.

 This is good. Phenomenal, actually. Because they're right, of course. In the article they cite Richard Spencer, leader of the white nationalist think tank, National Policy Institute, as coiner of the term "alt-right," essentially saying that we've all been duped by a guy who still thinks Hitler may have had a point.

It took a video of a bunch of these assholes (accompanied by Tila Tequila??) all throwing up Nazi salutes in a hotel in D.C. for Donald Trump to disavow them, and even then it was a pretty soft disavowal.

Trump gets asked again about the alt-right conference. 'Boy you are really into" this issue, Trump replies. Then disavows again.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016

Trump on alt-right supporters: "It's not a group I want to energize. And if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why."

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016

Ok. But this is also the guy that apparently slept next to a book of Hitler speeches and whose slogan "Make America Great Again" has drawn comparison to his equally follicularly ridiculous counterpart's insistence that his countrymen needed to "Make Germany Great Again." This is the guy who was endorsed by the aforementioned Richard Spencer and assembled Nazi bretheren and David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK and member of, you guessed it, the Nazi Party of America

I hesitate slightly to attribute Trump's rise to power solely to white nationalists, but only slightly. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I'd like to believe there are at least fewer than 50 million white nationalists living in the United States. But that's not to say that their existence and being provided a media platform is not still harmful and dangerous. Because they did, in some part, contribute to the slow march that led us here, the terrifying world we live in today where a man with recorded evidence of bragging about sexual assault is our next President.

The problem lies in our response to racism and our weirdly prideful insistence that it is less prevalent than is often noted by the people experiencing it. Most people responsible for the dissemination of news and information are, in fact, middle to upper-middle class white people, for whom racism is a fun buzz word to drop whenever you want to seem #edgy. It's not a real threat and it's something more akin to a tsunami in Japan. Horrible, but not personally threatening. And so it's pawned off by well-meaning (arguable) white folks who, because they are not racist themselves (also arguable), insist that racism must not exist. It's a thing of the past, typically seen depicted in history textbooks as a bygone product of the 1800s.

But it is still here, and our depictions and descriptions of it have softened to a flimsy description that gives racists the benefit of the doubt and allows for a narrative that this is all some sort of harmless nostalgia. Nazis were from Germany and they were defeated in the 1940s! We had a trial and everything! But they miss the fundamental point: Nazism and white nationalism are not stuck in one point in time any more than capitalism, communism or hare krishna is. They are part of an ideology that propagates racism, no matter what age of history it exists in.

Attempting to sideline these people as fanatics and allowing them to define themselves is bad news for a country already heading into a time of unprecedented (or maybe precedented) division and hatred. There's a lot to be said for ignoring and refusing to give them a stage, but it would do us no good to dismiss them and pretend that they don't exist. Especially for those particularly affected by their rhetoric and, eventually, actions.

So, please, when you see someone use the term "alt-right," correct them and make sure they're aware that although Nazis are no longer goose stepping through Berlin, they're certainly not gone, and racism is by no means dead.

Most of You Need to Fuck Off

Well that was a clusterfuck. There's not much that hasn't already been said, and far better than I could ever say it myself. So let's just jump right into it.

First of all, I'm going to go ahead and redact my previous blog post. This election definitely deserves to be discussed further. I originally wrote that post with the expectation (along with many others) that this election would go to Hillary. Quite unfortunately, I was wrong. Silly me.

The election, instead, went to recycled pile of old leather wallets doused with liquified orange peels brought to life by necromantic means, Donald Trump. Excuse me, President-Elect.

But fuck that. The refrain of "not my President" rings true today as Americans (roughly half, but likely more) find themselves staring at their hands in the hopes that they'll become robotic spiders and crawl away, ensuring that this is all some sort of horrible dystopian nightmare. But it's time to dispense with our coping and begin the process of moving forward, I guess. This post isn't really about that yet, though. Because honestly I'm still coping.

I don't know what to say. This blog is typically reserved for measured thought and calm reflection, but I'm beginning to think that I might be full of shit and that maybe we should just say fuck it and yell at the top of our lungs for a few months. Or four years. Which brings me to some of you on Facebook. A lot of you, actually.

There have been several variations of people in the wake of the news of Donald Trump's victory, with many leaning towards awful fuckwits hellbent on lording Trump's victory over the rest of us. To you, I have little to say, as I imagine not much will change you mind. The insults are mainly for my own self-satisfaction.

It's those of you taking a sort of passé apathetic approach to the whole thing that are so irksome. Congratu-fucking-lations on being born into a situation where you can afford a lack of feeling about the whole ordeal. The rest of the country is meanwhile scrambling to figure out how to proceed with their lives from here. If you are still saying that this is just as bad as if Hillary had won, then you're actually a fucking moron. Because you fail to recognize, as is wont to happen among the portion of the population most prone to self-advertised apathy (white dudes), that it's not just about how you fucking feel about things. It's also about how the others (women, PoC, LGBTQ+, Muslims, etc.) live and breathe. Which is decidedly not well, after last night.

And those of you who are still blaming the Democratic Party or Hillary's voice or whatever the fuck dumbass shit you've conjured up to delude yourself out of responsibility: well, also fuck you. We did this, together. Men and boys. White guys who hold social issues at arm's length in order to keep everything as abstract as possible. Living by an ideology is fine, but separating yourself from it is, frankly, cowardly.

I am to blame for this. In some part, at least. And to my fellow Americans (and, let's face it, citizens of the world) who will be far more affected by this than I: Um....sorry doesn't cut it. I owe you far more than an apology. I don't know what I'll do yet, but I'm not going to sit back and pretend like this is happening without my input. All I can do at the moment is urge my fellow fuckwits to try and do the same.

And that's it. No clever sign-off. This really isn't fun nor funny. If you wrote Harambe in, please jump into a gorilla cage and join your chosen candidate's brethren. That's it. G'night.

What Will We Talk About?

So, it's almost all over, thank GOD. Tomorrow we'll found out who gets to sleep with the nuclear codes and we can go back to just being existentially angry. Problem is: what the hell will we talk about? Up until now, we've spent the past >year (Jesus...) filling dead air with inane openers designed to steer conversation towards "So this election, huh?" But when it's all said, done and bitched about, what will we do?

Okay, well first: Let's dispense with the idea that discussion of the election will immediately dissipate post-tomorrow. I give it a good several months more of think pieces and unbearably long essays contemplating the notions of power before we finally settle back into our normal state of mind. What is that again? I can't remember a time before this election, can you? We can be glib and pawn it off as a sort of post-election mindset shift, but that's probably horseshit. As unique as this election was, it certainly didn't awaken a portion of ourselves that wasn't already there. And to say otherwise is to be remarkably narcissistic. Who really cares how you feel about this election? Don't worry, the question is directed right back at me too.

No, we're still the same self-absorbed, morality-hawking, human Bluetooth speakers connected to our subconscious that we were pre-election. We've just had a convenient and relevant vessel to distribute our anger through for the past year. But after? I don't know, I guess we'll complain about Game of Thrones spoilers and the occasional hour-long bump in social justice interest on Twitter. That's fine, I guess. Here are several other things you could talk about, though:

• California's drought 
• The Rock's movie career 
• Millennials 
• Westworld season 2 
• How cool Obama was
• A new Drake record, probably 
• Something Kanye did 
• Ken Bone (it'll be retro by then) 
• Whether you should buy a dog 
• Yourself 
• The North Dakota Access Pipeline (this is the right answer, btw) 
• This blog (this is the wrong answer) 
• Me (???) 
• Where your keys are 

And if none of those tickle your fancy, you could always just talk about nothing. In fact, that might be preferable.

Good luck, America.