The Low Expectations of Bigotry
The modern-day white supremacist movement in America is founded on an ideology steeped in contradictions. A group of people purporting to represent the “master race,” they constantly whinge that they are being “replaced” by non-Aryan peoples. The same cultural and political tradition responsible for Manifest Destiny now complains of “invasions” from immigrants and refugees from the southern border. But whereas their forebears could declare their racist sentiments openly without fear of reprisal, today’s white supremacists recognize how odious their views are to society at large, leading them to cloak their racism with obfuscating language that allows for some degree (however tenuous) of plausible deniability. And now, in the wake of the El Paso tragedy, their latest “trick” (fooling no one but themselves) is to claim white supremacy is a “hoax.” Grand Wizard Carlson was able to lie thusly to his millions of credulous viewers — of whom the current “president” is surely one — because, in the final analysis, everything else about white supremacy is counterfactual, including its existence to the very people who subscribe to its tenets.
