Atlantic Centurion

June 10, 2016

(((Jesse Benn))), a writer for shitlib clickbait site Huffington Post, is at it again. You may remember his name from last summer, when he penned an anti-white screed advocating for “white wounding,” an awkward rehash of last century’s “white guilt” meme, updated to include contemporary language about “white privilege” and “whiteness.” The gist is that White people have a duty to undo so-called White supremacy in order to bring about a “healthy form of whiteness.” You know you live in a White supremacist society when people are allowed to openly call for this stuff, right? In his own words:

How can we create a healthier feeling whiteness, one that doesn’t produce or perpetuate harm? One that is welcoming and encourages other “good” white people to join in the struggle for racial, social, and economic justice that we’ve committed ourselves to. A whiteness that can offer an alternative to the painful reality of what whiteness really is—oppression, exclusion, undue harm, undue benefit, privilege, and supremacy.

There is a lot of newspeak here, but in short he is saying that the very concept of White people, or Whiteness, is a moral evil and the only way to undo it is to politically ally with people of color against Whites. This is the regressive left, i.e. the true and unfiltered left, speaking honestly to us about what kind of world they want, a world free of White political power. The only healthy expression of identity for Whites is therefore to be anti-white, according to (((Benn))). He has essentially repackaged New Left ideology for the 21st century. The article takes the redirected racial-colonial conflict of the postwar period, which had replaced the marxist class struggle as the central ambition of the left, and transposes it onto the idea of White people themselves rather than White political control over majority non-white spaces and nations. That may seem like a domain shift to moderately-minded folks, to suggest Whites can’t even be allowed to exercise self-interested political control over their own spaces even after giving up control of spaces of color, but ultimately it is the same ideology following a hard-coded inevitable trajectory. The new marxist/postcolonial struggle is to destroy White homelands.

Rather aptly, his recent article, “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response to Trump is as Logical as Any,” takes the whole “white wounding” idea literally. (((Benn))) makes a number of factual errors that have been stock liberal talking points for the entire election—chief among them that Trump said “most Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals,” what he actually said was that illegal immigration from Mexico was a source of crime in this country—but the main idea of the article is that anti-Trump forces are justified in using violence against Trump and his supporters, who are overwhelmingly illiberal White people. In other words, he wants racially-motivated street violence and riots against illiberal White people. I guess he will keep his fingers crossed that the mob can tell (((him))) and his allies of Whiteness apart from evil fascists.

The justification given for violence is that Trump’s own rhetoric incites violence and that he is enabling European fascism in America. In a society that values free speech, or did prior to the ascent of political correctness, the idea that you should maul someone for voicing an opinion ought to be bunk. (((Benn))) conveniently ignores that Trump’s forceful rhetoric against protesters results from those same people disrupting his rallies. Trump saying agitators should be roughed up or thrown out is a reaction to them making it impossible for him and his supporters to conduct public speaking events. Trump events have been cancelled in the past over threats from leftists and mestizo racial activists, and in San Jose these same agitators actually assaulted multiple people. When Trump advocates using force to defend the right to peacefully assemble and speak, he is not inciting acts of political violence, he is preventing them. Of course, (((Benn))) sees nothing wrong with disrupting Trump events, so obviously the anti-Trump protesters couldn’t have done anything wrong and are actually victims of Trump, who picked on them for no reason other than him being a fascist bully.

(((Benn’s))) second premise in support of violence against Trump supporters is that Trump enables fascism. He argues that in order to prevent fascism, one has to use violence. Here he cites European antifa tactics as inspiration, which consist of using assault and terror against “fascists”—while under the tacit protection of the liberal state and police—in order to stop them from meeting or demonstrating in public. Does Trump actually enable fascism? Claiming he does is somewhat unfalsifiable given that, well, nothing has happened. Trump has not enabled any fascism to take over America. He himself is not a fascist, as (((Benn))) concedes, and the sitting government is not fascist. So where is the fascism that is taking over? He mentioned that Trump has shifted the Overton window, but that is more metapolitical than political. In reality, this is a psychological projection by violent leftists. The idea of Trump being an enabler of fascism stems from an ingrained fear of what I’ve termed fashism:

What then is fascism if the left believes it is currently fighting it? Social conservatism? Economic neoliberalism? Austerity policies? A meek civic or cultural nationalism? Anti-Islam expressed during an ongoing global war between Islamic terrorists and everyone else? Nativism? Xenophobia? Protectionist attitudes of working class Whites? Christianity? None of this is fascism. Even if you put all of these together it still wouldn’t be fascism; it would probably resemble paleoconservatism. So what is this fascism we hear about? “Fascism” is just anything the left is currently opposing; its raison d’etre is suppress anyone or anything that suggests equality is a myth and our world should be organized around the assumption that this is so. Fascism is the enemy they can most zealously mobilize against, because historically it was the most effective at suppressing them. The threat survives in their collective psyche as a sinister bogeyman.

If Trump incites violence and enables fascism, then by the same token we might conclude that (((Benn))) is doing both as well, using the vague liberal definition of fascism, i.e. “being a meanie-head.” In fact, (((Benn))) is literally calling for organized violence against Trump supporters. That is a world apart from suggesting security personnel forcibly remove rowdy agitators from campaign stops or that attendees should assist them. When (((Benn))) says he wants “violent resistance to Trump” and calls liberal nonviolence “effectively an effort to dictate the rules under which oppressed peoples respond to existential threats,” he is talking about racial violence against Whites in the language of anti-colonial nationalism and of black radicalism in the United States. This is Frantz Fanon for the oven middle class readership of Huffington Post. [That’s right, I am familiar with your canon].

The attack on nonviolence here—distinct from advocating violence—is particularly jarring, to me at least. (((Benn))) condemns “privileged” liberals for opposing the use of violence, because apparently not everyone has the privilege to be nonviolently opposed to things they don’t like. So what he is basically saying here is that the mainly black and mestizo protesters who have been attacking Trump supporters have no agency, while White liberals do. Ironically this is an alt-right critique of paternalistic White liberalism. (((Benn))) is implying that our new and diverse rising American electorate is incapable of participating in a civil political discourse and that therefore we have to resort to street violence and organizing militantly against political adversaries. Sounds like we are becoming a low-trust kakistocracy to me. I wonder if the demographic changes enabled by the 1965 (((Hart-Celler Act))) have anything to do with this.

Let’s wrap things up. Is it a coincidence that (((Benn))) is using weaponized cultural marxist rhetoric mashed up with anti-colonial boilerplate to make the case that White political movements should be violently destroyed? I don’t know, you tell me. You wanted to have a conversation about race, right?