Charlottesville and the Bearing of False Witness

I was torn whether to say something about the firing by Google of Mr. Damore, or cover instead the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Google's firing of James Damore, a software engineer, and form all accounts, a brilliant analyst, is to be condemned.  If Google were any ordinary company, they could be as Leftist, Progressive, Communist, and Marxist as they please, with no consequence to anyone else.  But Google as a large monopoly, with access to everybody's search engine history.  Indeed. Google attempts to control what you find with its search algorithms, which try to "nudge" you toward their preferred outcome.  This is dangerous, as it suppresses free inquiry and free speech. I suspect that as Kurt Schlichter suggested here, Google should probably be broken up as a monopoly enterprise for the good of society. Go read Schlichter's article. Enuff said.

The other item, however, is more disturbing, as people were injured and one killed.  It is disturbing because conservatives and classical liberals are being wrapped up in the same group as the KKK, white supremacists, white nationalists, and the so-called alt right, The first time I even had heard of the alt right was during a Hillary Clinton speech. I had to look it up. I consider myself a classical liberal, who believes the Founders were inspired, and who works to return the governance of this nation to its Constitutional roots. As such I abhor both the white supremacists and Antifa equally. Indeed, I abhor identity politics in general, as it is a cheap attempt to gain votes for illegitimate causes that can not stand up to scrutiny. So, upon reading John Hawkins' article at Townhall.com entitled How the Liberal Media Created Charlottesville, I found the correct place to lay the blame. Of course, the immediate blame lies with both the White Nationalists (who at least were protesting with a permit), and with the Antifa movement, but they would not have felt emboldened to show their hatred and evil ideologies in public had it not been for the mainstream media.

Hawkins writes:

To begin with, the liberal media is almost entirely responsible for growing the Alt-Right merger of hate groups and internet trolls. Most people are well aware of the stifling political correctness that reached an apex under Barack Obama. People are sick and tired of being attacked and scolded by the humorless left-wing thought police every time they stray from the latest liberal doctrine. That created a large group of people who enjoyed tweaking social justice warriors and some of them realized the easiest way to do that was with racial slurs. Every time some doofus leaves a noose on a college campus or says the N-word, it’s treated like a national crisis. If you’re an anonymous troll who enjoys getting people to react to everything you say, that’s a FEATURE, not a bug. All you have to do is say something racially offensive and all these people who studiously try to ignore you will go out of their minds.

That racial element gave the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK mouth-breathers a way to connect with the more socially adept trolls making the Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, the media liberals fueled them as well with their hypocrisy. They painted EVERY white supporter of Donald Trump or the Republican Party as a racist even as they ignored and defended the vicious anti-white rhetoric that has become commonplace on the Left. Just to give you a quick example of that, there was a hashtag that trended on Twitter after the attack called #ThisIsNotUS. It started out as a way for white liberals to virtue signal, but it quickly turned into an all too typical attack on white people, America and Trump voters...

The mainstream media has used the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a source for the grouping of all these disparate groups as members of the alt right. That is like using your crazy uncle, who never had anything to do with them, as a source for your conspiracy theories about the Bilderbergers and the Tri Lateral Commission. The fact is that the White Nationalists and the Antifa movement are both leftists groups. After all, NAZI stands for National Socialist and the full name of the group was the National Socialist German Workers Party. They have nothing to do with conservatism or classical liberalism, as John Hawkins makes clear:

On the other hand, white supremacists are nothing on the Right. David Duke is a joke. Richard Spencer? Let me tell you a little story about Richard Spencer. I was walking around CPAC and noticed an enormous gaggle of media surrounding someone I didn’t recognize, who didn’t seem to be drawing a crowd of regular attendees. As it turns out, the massive group of media people weren’t following a big name. They were following Richard Spencer, who was later kicked out of the conference, presumably because the organizers never wanted him there in the first place.

Yet Richard Spencer, like David Duke before him, is treated like some kind of rock star by the media liberals even though he’s a nobody in the conservative movement. Why? Because they don’t care about conservative opinion. They don’t care about conservative views. They care about creating propaganda that paints the Right as a bunch of hood-wearing, Nazi-saluting scumbags. So, they treat Richard Spencer like a rock star.

This creates a sort of Kim Kardashian effect. Ninety five percent of any influence Spencer has comes from the fact that anything he does is a big deal to the media. Why were Spencer and Duke able to gather even 500 Tiki torch-waving idiots in Charlottesville? Because the media would cover everything they did with bated breath. It gave them a chance to feel important, to feel like they were making an impact. In fact, white supremacists have started to believe their own BS because they keep hearing it from the media. After fighting with Richard Spencer on Twitter, I still remember one of his fans claiming that white supremacists were an essential part of Trump getting elected. My response was….

“Yeah, you guys made a bunch of Holocaust memes & called people cucks and then you're all....’I'm helping.’”

But of course, they weren't helping at all. Many people, not knowing any better, probably viewed the endorsements of Trump by various white supremacists groups as reason to vote instead for Hillary. Trump's victory might have been a landslide except for the outsized media presence these groups have. Indeed, the whole media presence, and the emphasis on the alt right during the election may have been a false flag operation designed to drive votes toward Hillary, as I have noted already the fact that these groups are also Leftist. Trump may have been as surprised and appalled by these groups endorsement as everyone else was.

On the Left, perhaps, lying about people is considered acceptable behavior as long as it achieves your ends, but among conservatives it is called Bearing False Witness, and is a violation of God's commandments.  In a court room, it would be called perjury, and it must stop.