White Supremacy Vs. White Power: Discuss
Where's the Great White Hope when you really need them?
There’s a modus operandi to this substack madness. While I’m not totally sure how it works for others, for me it works in the way Ted Bundy once suggested when he described his urge to kill as being like “having a song stuck in your head” that you can’t get rid of.
Well, Bundy found a way to get rid of it, and so have I, so much so that by the end of the next week, the topic that suggests itself is the one that’s been nattering away at the edge of conscious thought for the better part of the preceding week. At the edge, at first. By the weekend it’s demanding to be heard and despite the chagrin that’s been caused by my general disinterest in talking to any American anywhere at all about race for even a minute, it seems I can hear nothing else this week.
And just to clarify: my distaste for talking about race is the same sort of reluctance you feel rising when it comes to indulging just about anyone’s fetish…that you don’t share. Furries, Diaper Pail Club members, Cosplay folks, Trekkies, whatever your jam, if it’s not my jam, my eyes glaze over. So, my total comfortability with my negritude means indulging anyone else’s interest in it always feels kind of…perverse…to me.
Yet, like Michael Corleone, I keep getting pulled back, this week courtesy of the “free thinking” artist formerly known as Kanye West, now known as YE. If you’re a completist, or a stalker, you’ve heard the podcast IF THE SHOES FIT. On it I maintain a segment called “MistyAF,” a designation won every week by the least self-aware celebrity, person, process, or policy around.
A veritable swill of interpersonal insanity that embraces the lust for a puerile “made you look-itis” that comfortably congeals around racism, these white supremacists emerge more as attention deprived adolescents than anything else.
That is, people who don’t see what everyone else sees and that’s usually their imminent demise. Tesla has been a past winner (the Big 3 and every Japanese auto manufacturer will eventually do it better, faster and without all of the personal agita). So has the Metaverse. And just this last week? White supremacy.
The confused faces of my co-hosts, worth its weight in gold, gave way to that Arsenio Hall “things that make you go ‘ahhhh’” moment when a finer point was put on it.
“What does it say about white supremacy when your most popular and visible spokespeople are a Black guy, a Latino guy, and a Gay guy?” And if you throw the very Jewish Ben Shapiro in there you have a truly head scratching Four Horsemen of the Rahowa (Racial Holy War for those of you not in the know).
But the history of white supremacy is littered with suchlike weirdness. Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), during the time he and I broke bread over a possible magazine article, had a Mexican girlfriend. Proud Boys dude Gavin McInnes who first hired me back when he was at Vice, but before he wrote “Ten Things I Hate about Jews,” is married to a Native American. Herbert Egoldt, founder of Germany’s Neo-Nazi record label Rock-O-Rama, did business with me in trying to license the release of Stigmata, a decidedly non-racist band I had signed to my record label. And then there was the time I was kissed on the lips by a guy with a White Power shirt emblazoned with a chest-sized swastika.
I feel fairly certain each and every one of these people knew I was a Negro, and yet….
“We all have our favorite Jew…” was purportedly said by Himmler in explaining their zero-tolerance policy and their need to override it. Though even as he said it, the policy was proving to be porous up to and including Hitler. Meaning, elementally, though they claimed otherwise, Jewish humanity was understood as being real, just like ardent racists’ affinities for a mud person like myself, though undercutting their stated world view, has been a thing that’s happened.
So, what does it say about white supremacy that they can’t find any A-List white guys to sell it, and (sic) Fucker Carlson doesn’t count?
“The Nazis had the right idea,” Anton LaVey, head and founder of the Church of Satan once told me. “But where they went wrong is they played pedigrees.”
“It’s pretty…emasculating? Isn’t it?” Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto, drawls during a Skype from his show studio. He’s had Nick Fuentes on his show. He’s had Milo Yiannopoulos. Shining stars of the recent Trump dinner in which Holocaust denial and Hitler love was on full display, Goad has had them all on and is an equal opportunity misanthrope. Look up “don’t give a fuck” and his picture is prominently displayed.
“I think Kanye is, like Dave Chappelle said, ‘unwell’,” Goad says. “But I also guess that Pete Davidson is Jewish. Milo is also a ‘reformed’ Gay man and Fuentes? Gay, but not admitting it.” Then Goad trundles into a long personal history with the whole host of damaged brothers of the Iron Cross and what emerges is a melange of repressed sexuality, daddy issues, impotency, misogyny, resentment, and the recasting of racism as “Christian Nationalism”.
A veritable swill of interpersonal insanity that embraces the lust for a puerile “made you look-itis” that comfortably congeals around racism, these white supremacists emerge more as attention deprived adolescents than anything else. These are the guys drawing swastikas on their loose-leaf binders in high school. Who gave themselves 666 tattoos. Who are foot soldiers in a war against Dad.
And they could not give a shit, fundamentally, about White Power.
Now Henry Ford gave a shit about White Power. So did Jack Welch at GE. McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kemczinski might make that list. Trump? Sure. Biden? Why not? The net is big and runs wide and captures those that call the shots now no more or less than they always have.
“The Nazis had the right idea,” Anton LaVey, head and founder of the Church of Satan once told me. “But where they went wrong is they played pedigrees.” Had they just settled on killing everyone, LaVey continued, they would have given humanity “just what it deserved.”
So all that is poisonous, vile, weak, and ultimately deadly because it is poisonous, vile and weak is owned and operated by us, for us, against us. I’m not suggesting moral relativism here, that college-aged bête noire. But if the guy next to me on the bus shits his pants, if I can’t get off of the bus I’m still living with a man who’s shit his pants, smell and all.
Am I better than the pants shitter? Maybe. Maybe not.
One thing is aggressively certain though: I’m much nicer to sit next to. And, ultimately, that’s the least we can hope for.
Gosh, I just cannot imagine why you wouldn't want to discuss race and white supremacy! /s
O.o
So disappointed in the human race lately.