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.