A very real American basket of Deplorables just tipped over and spilled its wretched mess all over Charlottesville, staining the American and world media.
Hillary Clinton hit it nearly spot on when she called out, “half of Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables.” Yes, she overshot on the “half” part, but was absolutely right on the deplorable side.
And now, after murder and mayhem and international scandal in Virginia – coupled with a president who had to be badgered for 48 hours before he’d condemn hate speech – we now see in broad daylight who and what these deplorables are.
“Alt-Right” is a make-nice word for xenophobia, homophobia, racism, nationalism, discrimination, separation, militarization, and just about anything you can do or say to raise your own middling and muddling white group at the expense of everyone else perceived as “different from the norm.” It is not right and it is not conservative.
Yes, we’ve seen this all before, and our fathers and grandfathers fought to remove it from the Earth. Alt-Right” is damn close to Nazism, damn close to segregationist, and damn close to taking America back 100 years or more.
To hell with all of these racists, hiding behind their new “Alt-Right” moniker. They are a national disgrace and should be tossed out of the White House, tossed off the airways, and shut down from the web. In the name of free speech, we’re allowing a virus of hate, a repudiation of American values, an adoption of some strange “Ayn Rand meets the Klan” hate movement against just about anyone different than these poorly educated, lost-in-the-shuffle-of-progress, grumbling white folk.
Yes, these, the losers among us, would tell us they’re superior – and we’ve got to isolate the brown ones, the black ones, the gay ones, the Jewish ones, the “anyones” who might take their crappy Walmart jobs away.
I’m not having any of it, and neither should you. No hate speech against any minority, no violence against any group, no defilement of our best American virtues should be further tolerated.
With this, we’ve got to reject the meanness, the implied Trumpist racism and white nationalism quickly and forcefully. Trump won the election and until he’s either impeached, quits, or serves out his term, he remains the rightful president.
But we must still reject his divisionism, reject his implied hate, reject his tacit endorsement of these Alt-Right extremists.
You may think you’re doing OK, that you’re part of the “accepted group.” You may be white, middle class, a proper Republican, doing proper things. But when things really get whipped up, you may find you’re not the “right kind of white” and get tossed in to the real persecution our real minorities already endure.
Maybe you’re a Mason. Maybe you’re Catholic. Maybe you’re Mormon. Maybe you’re short and sickly. Maybe you’ve got dark hair and olive-ish skin. Maybe you’re fat, overweight, and costing our health care too much. And maybe you, too, someday become a hate target for the hate-others.
And beyond this specter of further American dystopia – we’ve already purposely subjected so many to so much violence and terror we see it is indeed possible for America to again go wildly astray as it has so often in the past.
We wholesale slaughtered our American Indian brothers. We kidnapped our Black American brothers from Africa, shipped them to America, and for 400 years made them to slave and build generational wealth for their white tormentors.
Our Chinese and Irish immigrants were made nearly slaves, building railways and working mines. Hispanics, abused in our fields, were forced to work in inhuman conditions so the rest of us could eat cheap food.
And all of these abuses and so many more over so many generations have created deeply embedded social challenges which we still must progressively address if we’re realistically going to face up to our stated American values.
America remains a land of vast inequality and vast variance in potential. White privilege does abound, and if you don’t think so, just consider the son of the white Harvard doctor who then gets a “legacy admission” into the same while an inner-city kid struggles in a tough, poorly funded high school.
We have structural inequality against so many minorities and yet these Alt-Right Neanderthals pump fists over how they, themselves, are so abused. Deplorable rubbish!
Perhaps you’ve heard minorities chant, “No justice, no peace.” I myself used to understand this as some kind of threat. Now I realize it’s no threat at all. It’s a straightforward formula for expected social outcomes anyone should understand.
No justice, no equality, no love, will absolutely result in no peace. Impoverished minorities won’t escape impoverishment and will resort to crime. Rough and unequal justice will create resentment and retaliation. Lack of empathy and acceptance will create friction, unease, and suspicion.
As long as we minimize the importance of social and racial justice, we remain captive of the results of the same.
American values of “liberty and justice for all” in truth means “love your neighbor as yourself.” Equal rights. Equal schools. Equal opportunity. Equal access to health care. It means more than acceptance. It means love your neighbor.
Alt-Right and the varied basket of deplorables marching with tiki torches have turned all this upside down. They are not “alternative conservatives.” They are anti-Americans, plain and simple. Hate and racism is simply that, and nothing else.
These folks and their actions are plainly, bluntly, deplorable. And that our own president tacitly accepts them and employs them is equally deplorable as well.
The “Alt-Right” white nationalist racists must be rejected out of hand and we must re-embrace our best American values.
Gary Horton is a Santa Clarita resident. “Full Speed to Port!” appears Wednesdays in The Signal.
