How to defend an anti-Semite without defending an anti-Semite
A master class in avoidance at AmGreatness.
Photo by Polina Zimmerman
It’s been a week now, and Donald Trump’s dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes is still a big topic of discussion, not least because Ye this week went on Alex Jones’ show and said nice things about Hitler.
The rapper Ye praised Adolf Hitler and Nazis in an interview Thursday with far-right provocateur Alex Jones, drawing a fresh round of condemnation for his incendiary antisemitism a week after he dined with former president Donald Trump alongside white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
“I like Hitler,” a fully masked Ye told Jones. Minutes later, the rapper said, “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.”
Kanye may be mentally ill — which is one reason I hate to see his recent misadventures play out so publicly — but that mental illness is definitely manifesting as anti-Semitism, to the point that it was too much for Elon Musk’s “free speech” regime at Twitter.
Over at the Trumpist website American Greatness, Christopher Roach responds to the whole thing with an attack on the left and its “pseudomorality.”
Even stipulating for a moment that Kanye et alia have said things that are offensive, racist, and even antisemitic, so what? What a dubious moral principle which says Trump cannot meet with such people, or, if one chooses to meet with them, one thereby endorses everything they ever wrote and said. Bad thoughts are not (yet) crimes, unlike Barack Obama’s cocaine use or Bill Clinton’s rape of Juanita Broderick. Yet no one has been condemned for meeting with those losers.
Moreover, Kanye and his new friends might be wrong, mistaken, confused, and hostile in having such views, but there is no such thing as a thought crime. Honorable people can be liberal or atheists, for example, and be wrong, mistaken, confused, and sometimes hostile in having such views. This does not make them criminals, and this does not mean that Trump or anyone has done something wrong in meeting with members of either camp.
“Stipulating for the moment” that racist things are racist is a pretty clear way of signaling that the racist thing was not, in fact, racist — a way of saying “I don’t believe this, but let’s pretend it’s true anyway so that I can demolish the argument on its own terms.” It’s a giveaway.
That said, let’s be clear here: Nobody’s saying a “thought crime” was committed here. Donald Trump isn’t going to jail for hanging with anti-Semites, nor are Kanye West and Nick Fuentes being dissented for their love of Nazis. What’s happening right now is that Trump, West and Fuentes are being criticized for their belies and actions.
You know. Free speech.
I suspect what’s happening here is that the views of Ye and Fuentes are a little too hot for AmGreatness to handle, which is saying something given that it also just printed this quasi-defense of the Buffalo shooter’s racist mindset:
Political violence against innocents is always evil, but1 in assessing how to stop that violence, it is important to understand that the motivations leading to violence matter.
If people are committing violence, for example, because they believe, for example, that most people are alien pod beings from another planet, then we should do everything we can to delegitimize their dangerous and delusional views. But replacement theory is not a crazy fever dream of conspiracy theorists, it is a very important empirical phenomenon, and there are many people adamantly opposed to our elites’ great replacement policies who are equally adamantly opposed to violence.
It’s one thing to explain away a rando killer in New York. It’s another to hop on the Hitler bandwagon. Too much, too much.
Still, Trump must be defended. But if you can’t defend hanging out with anti-Semites — and when you want to be president, again, it’s fair for the public to know who you associate with and why, call it “guilt by association” all you want — you can at least attack his critics for being mean and unfair, and do so in hysterical terms that muddy the issue.
It’s how you defend an anti-Semite without defending an anti-Semite.
Elsewhere…
My latest column for McClatchy is about Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and his crusade against immigrants receiving food stamps — even though the Kansas economy is built to a great degree on immigrant labor.
The cruelty of Marshall’s stance becomes even more apparent if you look to western Kansas, where a dominant meatpacking industry has thrived for decades on the back of a largely immigrant workforce (many of whom break immigration laws — with their employers’ full knowledge). Tyson provides more than 1 in 5 jobs in Finney County — but as Kansas News Service recently reported, nearly half the people seeking help at a Garden City food pantry come from households with people employed at the local Tyson plant.
The senator’s angry words about “incentivizing migrants” plays into the fantasies of those right-wing activists who see immigrants as a dangerous drag on society, sponging off public programs paid for by “real” Americans. Reality looks more like our Kansas neighbors, working difficult and often-brutal jobs that put meat on your table — and who still, after all that effort, need a little help. Those are the folks Marshall would penalize.
No sentence that starts “political violence is always evil, but…” is going to end well.