ANTI-SEMITISM IS UNACCEPTABLE; NOT SO FOR ANTI-WHITE RACISM AND PEDOPHILIA: Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review: It’s Time for the NRA to Cut Ted Nugent Loose. [archive] Original title: “Ted Nugent’s Anti-Semitism Disgraces Gun-Rights Movement, NRA”.
Ted Nugent should resign from the board of the National Rifle Association. And if he does not, he should be pushed from his position.
This week, in the course of “defending” the right to keep and bear arms, Nugent enthusiastically shared a choice piece of anti-Semitic propaganda [archive]. Then, shamefully, he refused to acknowledge [archive] or to address his mistake. If Nugent wants to behave like a fool, that is, of course, his prerogative. But he must do so in quarantine, a long, long way from the rest of us.
Earlier, by Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review: On Salon’s Much-Maligned Pedophilia Piece: [archive]
Don’t followers of Jesus believe that everybody is born with impulses that lead them toward unacceptable behavior? And don’t they also believe that they are called to act chastely — that is, to avoid indulging those impulses and instead to seek a way to be freed from them? It was a while ago, I accept, but I cannot recollect any caveats being attached to these rules. Are we now to suppose that it does not apply when the propensity in question is sufficiently egregious? Is there a new-fangled carve-out for instincts that turn our stomach?
It seems that, according to Charles C.W. Cooke, self-professed pedophiles deserve heartfelt ruminations about Christian charity, while supposed “anti-semites” deserve condemnation and ostracism. Priorities! Since Nugent “refused to acknowledge or to address his mistake” of posting a naughty, suggestive meme on Facebook (the factual accuracy of which Cooke does not dispute, by the way), he’s evil and thus should be shunned, regardless of his clarifying note expressing solidarity with Jews.
Nugent reserved his ire for particular people whose names and faces appear in the image he posted. In his follow-up post, he stated, “The founder of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership called me his 2nd Amendment/Freedom hero.” He does not make a sweeping statement about all Jews. This moderation on the part of Nugent is what Cooke calls “anti-Semitism, plain as day.”
Evidently, Cooke has no tolerance for criticism of any individual Jew that identifies him as a Jew. But the publication for which Cooke works, the flagship magazine of the Wuss Right, has no problem publishing critiques of working-class supporters of Donald Trump that identify them as white. Cooke’s colleague, Kevin Williamson, wrote recently, [archive]
Trump’s campaign, like Buchanan’s, is powered by the resentment and anxiety of the white working class.
Trump is this year’s celebrity mascot for the Buchanan boys.
The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them. Trump is supported by so-called white nationalists, as Buchanan was before him, but the swastika set is merely an extreme example of the sort of thinking commonly found among those to whom Trump appeals.
According to Williamson, “the white working class” consists of “frustrated white men” who think of themselves as victims and who engage in politics to benefit themselves at others’ expense. In other words, they put their interest as a victim group before the common good of the nation of which they are ostensibly a part. Nazis (“the swastika set”), today’s most hated group (if one goes by contemporary political rhetoric), are “merely an extreme example” of these people. So, these are basically the worst people in the world–or they would be, if they took their basic ideas really seriously.
Now, if a man described Jews in this way rather than whites, people like Cooke would call him an anti-semite. Indeed, according to Cooke, the image that Nugent posted on Facebook was supposed to suggest this very thing about Jews: The Israeli flags on the individual portraits supposedly indicate, if not foreign allegiance, then at least a separate identity that takes precedence over the common good of the nation.
And that’s not all. Williamson has elsewhere mocked “the white working class,” the “Buchanan boys” who support Donald Trump. He has claimed, for example, that Trump supporters don’t read books, in a post originally titled, “Donald Trump’s Supporters: ‘Establishment Bad, and What’s a Book?'” [archive], later retitled to the less-descriptive “Our Post-Literate Politics”, and then retitled to the enigmatic (and less obviously insulting) “Translating ‘Make America Great Again’ into English”. And on Twitter, Williamson likes throw around the derogatory term “peckerwood,” meaning a poor white person, [archive] once referring to members of the “Trump movement” as “a little trivial gang of gap-toothed peckerwood-trash idiot children cowering in anonymity on the Internet.” [archive] Williamson does not use similar language about the poor or working class people of any other racial group.
Cooke has neither criticized Williamson, nor called for him to be shunned, on account of anti-white racism. And yet, Williamson’s track record of anti-white racism is significant, especially when compared to Nugent’s harmless meme. But who cares about persistent anti-white racism when there are self-professed pedophiles to defend, and critics of individual Jews to condemn?