untethered

Gateway Pundit is breathlessly passing along a report that AOC’s chief of staff in training has a genuine Nazi connection.

…AOC’s Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, the congresswoman-elect may well find herself destined for trouble.

…Saikat Chakrabarti is a highly motivated, smart guy. A Harvard grad, he founded a web tools company, Mockingbird. He is a founder of Justice Democrats, the PAC set up with The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, was instrumental in getting AOC elected, and is presently going through congressional training to learn how to become an effective chief of staff for the Dems’ golden girl.

Based on a recent clothing choice, Chakrabarti might justifiably be considered a Nazi sympathizer. But really? Well, yes. In his latest love-fest video for AOC, Chakrabarti is sporting a tee-shirt that features a portrait of Subhas Chandra Bose. Not familiar with this former Indian head of state? Here a few facts:

• Bose was an ally of Adolf Hitler and met with him personally in 1942.
• Bose founded the Free India Legion (FIL) made up of troops captured by Nazi Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
• The FIL swore an oath to Hitler and was under SS command.
• Bose teamed up with the Japanese in 1943.
• Bose was an admirer of the USSR and sought to implement its authoritarian practices in India.

Bold added.

Bose was an Indian nationalist who allied with Germany and Japan against Britain in World War II. Unlike Gandhi, he pursued armed revolution. We are learning about the man because Cortez’ guy Chakrabati was photographed wearing a t-shirt with his likeness, a la the familiar Che Guevara shirt.

The Indian Chakrabati appreciates Bose as an Indian nationalist who fought for independence. As smart as he is I bet he doesn’t see the contradiction between his Indian nationalism and his progressive politics which are the antithesis of nationalism.

As a typical progressive he’ll work against American nationalism, in the office of a representative who recently made a statement of foreign nationalism remarkable for an elected representative, when she declared the US has no right to immigration restriction because we are on land stolen–from her ethnic group.

Meanwhile the mainstream right can only do what it always does, cry Nazi, in the hope enough powerful American Jews will be motivated to oppose her. Americans can only defend themselves against hostile foreign national sympathies by invoking other foreign national sympathies via their ultimate Bad Guys of nationalism, the Nazis.

In the meantime we can expect the development of national consciousness in more and more Americans of foreign descent, and their attendant political factions, doing battle in the ruins of the American republic, fighting for primacy, seeking to direct foreign policy to favor their homelands and, of course, government set-asides.

To defend against this disaster we’re allowed to invoke Nazis, but never double loyalties, because of the outsized power of history’s greatest diaspora nationalists.

None of this is new. Hispanics have been stewed in racial politics since the sixties; the only thing that’s saved us is the apathy Hispanics have for social or political questions.

Alan Wall reports in VDare on the California Attorney General’s Spanish-language response to the State of the Union

[B]ecause as a son of immigrants, I saw my parents struggle and I witnessed all they had to pass through. I believe that the DACA beneficiaries are going to be the best leaders that the United States will have. … It’s very personal. … Everything I do is based on how I grew up. I defend the immigrants with passion because I saw immigrants every day of my life. I know how hard they work. … when somebody hits an immigrant, he is hitting my father and my mother.

The left has been humoring pan-Hispanic nationalism because no one takes it seriously. The Hispanic voting block is desirable because it’s made up of low-information voters who can be expected to vote as they’re told (though you might have to send out vans to get them to the polls).

We can’t hope for such apathy from the newer groups that are being encouraged by leftist demagogy to embrace their racial nationalism and organize around it in the same way as the Hispanics before them. Groups with higher intelligence aren’t going to adopt civic nationalism and assimilate–not while everyone else is striving for preeminence. To stand on principle is to be a sucker. Worse, higher intelligence isn’t correlated with political activity; low-IQ groups like Somalis appear to be highly political.

Our dystopian future involves various ethnic political groups striving for their fair share of the spoils of an American empire turned inside-out, self colonizing out of greed and the hostile national sympathies of our most powerful ethnic group.

Cheerio!

In the New York Times Bret Stephens takes on the hydra-headed beast Intersectionality; it appears to have turned its countless bloodshot eyes on the Jews

It happened again last month in Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish state.

They were met with sustained applause by the audience at what is the largest annual conference of L.G.B.T.Q. activists in the United States. Conference organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.

For Tyler Gregory, neither the behavior of the protesters nor the passivity of the organizers came as a surprise. Gregory is executive director of A Wider Bridge, a North American L.G.B.T.Q. organization that works to support Israel and its gay community. In 2016, his group hosted a reception at the Task Force’s conference in Chicago. The event was mobbed by some 200 aggressive demonstrators, and Gregory and his audience had to barricade themselves in their room while those outside were harassed.

“Whether you believe in the concept of intersectionality is beside the point,” Gregory told me recently, referring to the idea that the oppression of one group is the oppression of all others. “If this is your value system, you are not following it. As Jews we were denied our safe space. We were denied our place in a movement that fights bigotry.”

You may not be interested in intersectionality, but intersectionality is interested in you.

But no, even they can’t define intersectionality (oppression of one is oppression of all, the hoary old chestnut that isn’t even true, isn’t it; in fact, it’s more like oppression of me is more than oppression of thee); it’s a word they adapt to context: when combining and focusing claims upon the “oppressor” white male–when looting, and when assigning status within the hierarchy of grievance–when divvying up the loot.
But mostly it seems to involve the inevitable infighting of a coalition of interests sustained by shrill demagogy. “Intersectionality” is also a euphemism for that infighting and its vicious nature.

Stephens laments the takeover of the Women’s March movement by antisemites and the entrance into Congress of Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Ohmar, and sees in yet another remarkable concession to Israel the stirrings of real trouble:

Progressives — including presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — also united behind Vermont’s Bernie Sanders in a failed bid to block a Senate bill, passed on Tuesday, that includes an anti-B.D.S. measure prohibiting federal contracts with businesses that boycott Israel, ostensibly on free-speech grounds. One wonders how these same Democrats feel about, say, championing First Amendment protections for bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay couples.

Israel’s influence is perhaps stronger than ever, but the Democrats’ lurch left might be the beginning of the end.

What’s unsettling is that the far-left’s hostility is now being mainstreamed by the not-so-far left. Anti-Zionism — that is, rejection not just of this or that Israeli policy, but also of the idea of a Jewish state itself — is becoming a respectable position among people who would never support the elimination of any other country in any other circumstance.

How is that not precisely what we have in store for every single Western country? The apparatus of government remains, even some of its traditions, but the ethnic nature is changed–for the better, bigot! The only real rejoinder Zionists have to this is a legalistic argument–the United States wasn’t explicit enough in designing itself as an ethno-state. Should’ve got it in writing, goyim.

The state of Israel does not vanish, obviously, under the one-state solution. Jewish supremacy (a perfectly normal desire of Israeli Jews) likely does, and the country becomes multicultural. Let your imagination run wild: Israel becomes the world’s moral superpower, humanity is once and forever cured of antisemitism, Israel is a light unto the nations…

Within Israel Jews will continue to dominate for generations at least, and will be relieved of the moral burden of occupation and the threat of terrorism.

And it is churning up a new wave of nakedly anti-Jewish bigotry in its wake, as when three women holding rainbow flags embossed with a Star of David at the 2017 Chicago Dyke March were ejected on grounds that the star was “a trigger.”

Just as the American flag is now sometimes a “trigger”.

The progressive answer is straightforward: Israel and its supporters, they say, did this to themselves. More than a half-century of occupation of Palestinian territories is a massive injustice that fair-minded people can no longer ignore, especially given America’s financial support for Israel. Continued settlement expansion in the West Bank proves Israel has no interest in making peace on equitable terms. And endless occupation makes Israel’s vaunted democracy less about Jewish self-determination than it is about ethnic subjugation.

Self-determination and ethnic subjugation have gone hand-in-hand throughout history. For all the Holocaust kitsch through which we’re supposed to understand it, the Palestinian-Israeli fight is the oldest type of struggle: two groups contending over land, with the subsuming of one population a potential outcome (if improbable).

Next is the belief that anti-Zionism is a legitimate political position, and not another form of prejudice.

There are many genuine progressive true-believing Jews who would beg to differ.
By conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism Israel gets to have its cake and eat it too. Anti-nationalism is wrecking Western nations and their attendant ethnic groups, and we’re all to pretend it’s incidental to, for one, the religion of “white privilege” that intersects. Jews have only Israel. I get it. I support it. But all we ever had were our nations too, and they were the best.

It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being, at least not where it is now. It is also fair to say that there is much to dislike about Israel’s current leadership, just as there’s much not to like about America’s. But nobody claims the election of Donald Trump makes America an illegitimate state.

Actually they kind of do. I’ll say they’ve gone you one better: the “Resistance” holds the state is captured by illegitimate powers (illegitimate because they see the US as a sort of Israel for whites, in this view) and is waging a coup.

In fact, they’re using the election of Donald Trump to further pathologize the white history of America. They are claiming the election of Trump negates the moral basis of the US. They are out of control. Brett must not get out much.

Israel is now the home of nearly nine million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it, with no real thought of what would likely happen to the dispossessed. Do progressives expect the rights of Jews to be protected should Hamas someday assume the leadership of a reconstituted “Palestine”?

Au contraire. The Dutch, as every other western nation, are currently surrendering their nation and identity with enthusiasm, and I would note anti-popular compulsion from an alienated elite.

Do Americans expect the rights of whites to be protected–screw that, are they being protected?

To say, as progressives sometimes do, that Jews are “colonizers” in Israel is anti-Semitic because it advances the lie that there is no ancestral or historic Jewish tie to the land. To claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, when manifestly it is not, is anti-Semitic because it’s an attempt to Nazify the Jewish state. To insist that the only state in the world that has forfeited the moral right to exist just happens to be the Jewish state is anti-Semitic, too: Are Israel’s purported crimes really worse than those of, say, Zimbabwe or China, whose rights to exist are never called into question? “Genocide” is an overused term, and does not “nazify” (idiotic word) anything, Jews in Germany were economically and even politically powerful in the 1920s.
And then they were in Buchenwald.

Indeed. To be powerful but vulnerable was the Jews’ misfortune. Zionism answers that vulnerability in the obvious way, establishing a homeland for the Jews, and discrediting the concept of “homeland” outside of Israel via secular progressive politics dominated by diaspora Jews has been the other answer.
Isn’t it time for Jew and white gentiles to forge a new agreement, whereby we all get to keep our countries?

 Israel appears powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but considerably less so in the context of a broader Middle East saturated with genocidal anti-Semitism. American Jews are comparatively wealthy. But wealth without political power, as Hannah Arendt understood, is a recipe for hatred. The Jews of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh are almost surely “privileged” according to various socio-economic measures. But privilege didn’t save the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue last year.

Indeed, and their political privilege over and above all didn’t save them either–from a prototypical “loser” as they would describe him; that is, from someone with no real privilege (just the Orwellian curse of “white privilege”, which is not an idea that originated from the underprivileged of any stripe, curiously enough).

The notion of “privilege” based on socio-economic disparities collapses. Whites are supposedly “privileged” in the US, but they’re hunted on the streets by blacks, who are described, comically, as a “vulnerable” group. We are in a position not unlike Jews under periods of extreme antisemitism when we attempt to navigate black geographic strongholds, when we endure periodic pogroms and watch as our culture and wealth are appropriated, as privilege (by any other name) is established on behalf of ever angrier and uglier complainants lacking the intelligence and self-awareness to see their absurdity.

We need a new way.

Andrew Sullivan:

It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event.

I’ve no doubt that many will see these women as anti-trans bigots, or appeasers of homophobes and transphobes, or simply deranged publicity seekers. (The moderator, Ryan Anderson, said they were speaking at Heritage because no similar liberal or leftist institution would give them space or time to make their case.) And it’s true that trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. It’s also true that they can be inflammatory, offensive, and obsessive. But what interests me is their underlying argument, which deserves to be thought through, regardless of our political allegiances, sexual identities, or tribal attachments. Because it’s an argument that seems to me to contain a seed of truth. Hence, I suspect, the intensity of the urge to suppress it.

The title of the Heritage panel conversation — “The Inequality of the Equality Act” — refers to the main legislative goal for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ lobbbying group in the US. The proposed Equality Act — a federal nondiscrimination bill that has been introduced multiple times over the years in various formulations — would add “gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rendering that class protected by anti-discrimination laws, just as sex is. The TERF argument is that viewing “gender identity” as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. How can lesbianism be redefined as having sex with someone who has a penis, they argue, without undermining the concept of lesbianism as a whole? “Lesbians are female homosexuals, women who love women,” one of the speakers, Julia Beck, wrote last December, “but our spaces, resources and communities are on the verge of extinction.”

Feminism right now seems unassailable, but the way women are handing over their identity to trans “women” suggests they’re not really in charge–the men are, still. The gay men, and they like men in dresses. Always have.

No sooner had women established themselves as a political faction than they’re giving away the franchise. The Equality Act and the movement from which it emerges says anyone gets to be a woman. Regular women of course were never been consulted.

There is social and, now, political value in being a woman, and the ladies are being conned out of it by gay men, which is kind of funny when you get past the disaster it represents: the charming gay con man swindling a gullible woman out of her fortune is a familiar trope.

Women established themselves politically by destroying the old, putatively limiting definitions of femininity, converting their old social privilege for legal and political privilege. The trans rights movement, should it continue as it is, will render that privilege meaningless, and there’s no road back to the oppressive old pedestal.
A culture of you-go-girl propaganda, sexual hysteria, resource looting and demagogy does not a female identity make.

We see now that femininity has always been too important to leave to women.

That Heritage panel is chilling.

The lesbians on this panel point out how the trans movement contradicts what they represent, and liberal secular values generally, identifying femininity with make-up and dresses. The whole drag fixation is just another glaring contradiction we can’t see for all the contradictions.

But gay Andrew Sullivan sees the great zombie horde will eventually come for him:

 This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives; but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality. If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.” Contemporary transgender ideology is not a complement to gay rights; in some ways it is in active opposition to them.

Faster, harder you might say, if you want to hasten the end. The Narrative really is eating itself, but that doesn’t mean it has to lose power–the demographic shift taking place still promises one-party rule, and soon. America faces the prospect of rule by a Democratic Party that can’t govern for the same reason it can’t be voted out.

Subscribe to my new YouTube channel because how else are you going to detox from all the boring-ass streams you normally listen to?

Jezebel weighs in on a trend in old-fashioned prairie dresses (sadly there’s no evidence of this promisingly modest style appearing in Portland):

“There is something about the idea of a frontier woman that’s so interesting to me, because it’s so tough and adventurous,” Hay, one of the original purveyors of the prairie dress, told The Daily Beast in October. “I love mixing that strength with styles that are covered-up, dainty, and restrained.” 

The dresses evoke a certain nostalgia, a throwback to a time when femininity and women’s identity was sharply defined and didn’t have to be individually conjured or chosen.

There’s something to this. Individually “conjured” or “chosen” identities aren’t all they’re made out to be. Women today are overwhelmed with countervailing pressures at every turn to “define” themselves–most of it coming from corporate America or other self-interested entities. Liberated from traditional femininity to be slaves to commerce. Miserable, jaded, unable to give expression to their disappointment. But choices at every turn!

One was a homemaker, in the literal sense of making a home from scratch, and a wife, mother, and defender of the family. There’s a comforting familiarity to it. Lena Dunham told the New Yorker, “They really look like […] the dresses that characters in your favorite book would have worn.” 

It’s a pleasant thought. But in Dunham’s likely “favorite book,” Ma is also startlingly, overtly racist, in ways that are inextricable from her brand of frontier femininity. “Why don’t you like Indians?” Laura asks her over corn cakes and molasses on the steps of their covered wagon, which Ma had laid out like a table, complete with a centerpiece of flowers in a tin can. “I just don’t like them,” Ma replies. “And don’t lick your fingers, Laura.”

Nothing will be left standing. Everything is imbued with our sin.

The very modesty of the dresses triggers as well. It’s a shame. They really will leave women no avenue but slut-hood or the burka before they’re done.

There certainly is a feminist argument for conservative dress. Presently, as no one is standing up to them, the women demand the right to dress like prostitutes but take offense at so much as catcalls on the street. But they’re still going to considerable trouble to outfit themselves, as feminists will complain, as visual titillation for men.

Conservative attire tells men it’s off-limits from the start and demands respect.

So this Jezebel writer can’t help but make the trend sound appealing, and I think I can see how women might be attracted to it:

Yet the resurgence of the prairie dress, and of the frontier femininity it represents, is shorn entirely of the racism and colonial entitlement it once cloaked. Recent reporting has remarked on a resurgence of the “traditional,” in dressing styles, gender roles, and ways of living, perhaps as a reaction among progressive urban-dwellers to the anonymity and economic, cultural, and political demands placed on them by modern life. The mythology of the homesteading woman is infused with just enough adventure, strength, and pluck to make its version of womanhood appealing to women who have rejected other models, in particular, the post-war-era American ideal of the suburban wife and mother. It is internalized as feminism: one that claims a traditional appearance and traditional role as a radical act.

Girls tarted up are prisoners of the present sexual chaos. Women properly dressed are not. They put up a border against it; they have sovereignty. They have agency.

The prairie dress is a radical act in this environment.

But there is another specter besides a potential resurgence in modesty haunting modern femininity–not enough women writing letters to the editor. A lady-reader writes to the New York Times:

Similarly, submitting a letter In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.” Although he was referring specifically to sentimental novelists, his letter expressed the larger belief that women’s writing was not worth reading or publishing, that their words and ideas didn’t matter, and that their work was, to use the language of Hawthorne, “trash.” 

As a historian, I see this playing out not only in the antebellum period, but also in the postwar era when I read letters to the editor. As I scan through various national newspapers, day after day, year after year, I find myself hoping that someday, eventually, women will be represented proportionally. I am always disappointed; they always skew male. 

Perhaps Hawthorne’s disdain for scribbling women is not such distant history. 

Does she know that this “Harry Potter” they speak of is not the author of the Harry Potter books?

This problem is especially concerning because unlike an Op-Ed — where the writer presumably has some expertise in the subject matter — anybody can submit a letter to the editor. It is, I’d argue, the most democratic section of the paper because children and adults, billionaire philanthropists and minimum-wage workers, and people of all genders can contribute. Each has an equal opportunity to express her or his thoughts and participate in a robust debate in the public sphere.

I know letters to the editor are the latest in media innovations (are women sending enough telegrams?), but this better describes social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube. Also dominated by guys, most of whom work for free. That’s the real distinction: guys will work for free to show off their knowledge of something.
Letters to the editor strike me as of the same category as white guys showing you how to do things on YouTube for free.

The problem of course is it makes the guys look good. It’s a masculine virtue, inextricable from all the putative “toxic masculinity”.

But it doesn’t make men look better than women–if you accept biology and not feminism’s premise that we are essentially no different but for the plumbing.

The feminists–and us, as long as we’re in their thrall–are hamstrung by this necessity: having declared the sexes “equal” in all things, women will continually come up short in comparisons. But if we accept sex roles and their biological basis, we recognize comparing male and female characteristics like this as comparing apples and oranges.

In fact, putting too much energy into hobbies or non-paying work, no matter how altruistic, is just the sort of thing wives chide their husbands for–if they’re any good.

Therefore, I’m troubled that in 2019, The New York Times struggles to find women’s letters that are worthy of publication. to the editor says that in a society that refuses to acknowledge your full humanity, you insist on it. It is asserting that your ideas and words deserve an audience in a world that has historically devalued them. It is accepting that you most likely will never receive external validation for your efforts save for an automated email thanking you for your letter. 

This really has to stop. It’s clear one reason women don’t write letters to the editor is because it doesn’t offer them a sense of validation. Men, on the other hand, will sometimes devote their lives to a cause without once asking.

You have to wonder if they’re paying attention. Didn’t we just hear about this guy?

Is any of this making women happier? Sparking their joy?

The thing is, this stuff is supposed to work.

And the Covington Catholic school boys hoax worked only too well, and too quickly–swallowing it hook line and sinker the Narrative can’t just spit it back out now.

I first learned of it when overhearing an earnest young man telling someone else about a disturbing video of MAGA teens setting upon “indigenous people”, how he couldn’t stop thinking of it and how this must be one of those pivotal moments in political history. And every one of the crazed responses online betrayed something like hope, that this horrendous act, finally, would Change Everything.

And it might.

Despite being a typical leftist hoax-outrage in its elements, this one transcended the genre. The image was that powerful, the players that compelling, the context, the timing; there’s nothing to do but mix the cliched metaphors: This perfect storm struck a chord.

The desperation of the “resistance” to get Trump is a constant. The visceral responses to the initial Covington video revealed something more, a post-shock confidence, confidence in the power of the searing image to justify escalation in their cold war on white men. Now it was truly “on”; or so they thought. New rules applied and it was about time.

So it’s instructive and chilling to have seen how they reacted when they felt certain there would be no walking-back. Indeed, the pressure was on to show how much one was appalled, how much he hated those awful kids.
The calls for violence resembled nothing so much as those calling for harsh punishments for terrorists; a gruesome signalling contest sets in, with people trying to outdo one another in severity to show they, truly, truly despise the terrorists. Sure, you’d hang them, but I’d have them drawn and quartered!

If your intention was to expose the true, emotional depths of anti-white animus in this country you could have done a lot worse than expose right-thinkers, now well into their cloistered, post-Trump indoctrination, to the kids from Covington. The students, with their unashamed white-male-ness, emerged as if directly from the recent APA report pathologizing masculinity, Gillette’s gloomy ad , or the pages of a Rolling Stone “expose” of “rape culture” in college. Haven Monahan finally revealed himself and he was everything they said, ready to stuff the hollow-cheeked old Indian into the nearest book locker.

The moral high ground is held by appropriating historical-cultural archetypes. That of the Noble Indian rivals even the Numinous Negro in emotional punch. We hear so much more from the latter because he’s top producer of demagogic energy, while Indians lack charisma (the Noble Indian is distinctly un-charismatic in his laconic dignity). Blacks have, disastrously, proven to be very entertaining in their dysfunction, and their very savagery–for lack of a better word–is indispensable to their cultural domination. This subtext underscores the demagogy like a bass line.

Meanwhile, the Noble Indian remains unassailably sympathetic, the embodiment of all the sins of colonialism, slavery, genocide. He suffers in quiet dignity at a time when loud, angry blacks–such as the Black Hebrews–dominate. Perhaps if the average white American had to endure the daily absurdities Indians might visit upon them things would be different. But the Indian remains more myth than experience in the collective consciousness.
Nathan Phillips’ sorry physical appearance makes him appear as if the embodiment of Indian’s post-genocidal condition. He was perfectly cast for the moment.

But his was definitely the supporting role. This was about the kids. They impressed not because they fit the crafted image of Trump supporters–which we’re supposed to see as knuckle-dragging losers, incels, old. That’s who they would have picked, of course, but this accident of fate made for genius casting: the rosy-cheeked white youths against the emaciated, Christ-like suffering Indian.

There was another archetype at hand to project onto them: the smug, psychologically unassailable Wasp bad guy from every other eighties film about high school, and their real life avatars.
And there he was, smirking right in the face of the Noble Indian.

It tore open the personal-mythic memory of boomers and millennials.

Go with your first impression, and those vibes, this scribe advised

Two days ago, video was posted online that pretty much everyone who saw immediately recognized for what it was—footage of white teens taunting and harassing a Native American elder named Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. What was happening was clear and unmistakable, not just resonant but immediately recognizable as iconic. If you wanted to compress the history of relations between the powerful and the powerless in America, or the dynamics of the current moment, into a single image, you couldn’t do much better than to present a white teen in a MAGA hat, surrounded by a screaming horde of his peers, smirking into the face of an old Native American man.

Watching the video accompanying this story you realize what triggered the author and her ilk is the healthy confidence and defiance of the youths:

1 of 4 – Indigenous Peoples March #MAGAyouth, Nathan Phillips and others from Indian Country Today on Vimeo.

The truly triggered, those still holding the line, were triggered by the sight of healthy, well-adjusted young men. Triggered by high school cheers!

They showed their fangs, they said “things you can’t take back”, they revealed the depths of their hate for a second there, and there’s no returning.

And into this glorious future we go.

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