Hating Hate

Hating the haters. We all hate hate. Some hate hate more than others hate hate but we are all viscerally and violently opposed to hate. By the terms of the prevailing narrative, the hate in our hearts translates into hateful actions. If we want to eliminate murder and other acts of violence we must eliminate hate from our hearts, and from the media. But not just any old hate. We must especially expunge the hatred associated with bigotry. (Of course, those who hate white people and who hate Jews are excused from following this rule.) Of course, we must also eliminate all guns, because without guns there would be no gun violence.

Somehow or other this is all too facile. We saw a plethora of violent hateful mass murders during the Obama years, but somehow or other, no one ever thought to blame the Ft. Hood massacre, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino killings and the homophobic Orlando shootings on President Obama. And, let’s not forget Adam Lanza and James Holmes, mass murderers both, who committed their atrocities during the Obama administration.

Again, perhaps we are being over simpleminded in saying that hateful rhetoric incites hateful actions. It might be more a question of correlation than of causation. In many cases weakness incites far more violence than does hate.

Then again, Obama was a disciple of the hate preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When the media found out about Wright, we were shown it over and over again. Did Obama's two decades association with Wright legitimate the man's hatred. We know that Obama renounced Wright, but if you believe that twenty years of brainwashing can be erased with a twenty minute speech you are far more gullible than you think.

After all, Rev. Wright is close to Rev. Louis Farrakhan, America’s leading anti-Semitic hatemonger. Why does that not count? Why did the Obama election not work to legitimate people like Wright and Farrakhan? Why did Obama’s obvious disdain for the prime minister of Israel not help make it safe to be anti-Semitic… and thus to hate?

Of course, Obama came to us from Chicago. If his election was supposed to heal the nation’s wounds, the message seems not to have reached Chicago. Under the aegis of Mayor Emanuel, formerly Obama’s chief of staff, that city saw an appalling murder rate, and it was not perpetrated by white supremacists. 

On the one side, we have President Trump, a man who said that some of the participants at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville were good people. An astonishingly ham handed remark, to say the least. To call it Hitlerian is hyperbole.

And that Trump recommended the certain members of Congress, those who have been hating Trump and Jews, should go back to their native countries. It was a dumb thing to say, but ought we not to remark that the Squad, as they call themselves, has been trafficking in hatred. Didn’t AOC recently promote rioting as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem? Didn’t she say that certain groups would be justified in rioting over here?

Hateful rhetoric, anyone.

And then there is the obvious observation: how much of our media time has been filled with hate directed against Donald Trump? How much of it has been filled with calls to destroy the lives of anyone who supports Trump? How much of it has been filled with hatred against Brett Kavanaugh, against everyone who ever worked for Trump? Given that hate was on the menu during the Kavanaugh hearings, no one really cared that attacks on him would also inflict serious damage on his wife and daughters. Hate does not know boundaries.

When you spend your time denouncing Trump as Hitler, when you violently recommend that members of the administration be harassed at gasoline stations, might we not say that you are fomenting hatred. Next to his Democratic and media antagonists, Trump’s expressions, taken as expressions, are mild indeed.

A few days ago, Victor Davis Hanson catalogued some of the hateful rhetoric directed against President Trump, from Joe Biden’s stated wish to beat the hell out of him to Corey Booker’s stated intention to smack him in the mouth. 

And then there are the Hollywood celebrities who have wished the most violent horrors on Donald Trump. It’s almost as though they were competing to see who can foment more hatred.

Hanson wrote:

Actor Robert De Niro has repeatedly expressed a desire to physically assault Trump. A month before Trump was elected, De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Later, De Niro doubled down with a series of “F*** Trump” outbursts….

On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the White House that she had thought of blowing it up.

A few months later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.

Since then, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have been in constant competition to imagine the most gruesome way of killing off Trump: stabbing, blowing up, burning, shooting, suffocating, decapitating, or beating.

Celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore seem to relish the media attention as they discuss or demonstrate what they seem to think are creative ways to kill the president.

Do we believe that one kind of hatred is acceptable while another is beyond the pale? When Antifa radicals smashed in the head of a journalist in Portland, is it acceptable? It is acceptable enough for the Mayor of Portland to order his police officers not to intervene.

Is violence now the accepted currency of political debate? If so, why should we be surprised when people on both ends of the political spectrum resort to it. Keep in mind, the white nationalist maniac who shot up a Walmart in El Paso was not the only mass killer from this weekend. The Dayton shooter, Connor Betts, supported Elizabeth Warren. Should we believe that leftist hatred drove him to murder nine people. If so, the name of Betts will quickly be erased from the history books.

Connor Betts, to call him by his name, was a leftist extremist. Heavy.com summarizes the content of his social media:

On his Twitter page, reviewed by Heavy, he described himself as “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” He wrote on Twitter that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.” The Greene County Board of Elections lists his party as “Dem.” You can read a roundup of his tweets – which also dealt with Parkland, Florida and 9/11 – here and later in this article.

Should we blame his actions on the intemperate rhetoric of Elizabeth Warren? Should we blame the actions of James Hodgkinson on the intemperate rhetoric of the slightly unhinged Bernie Sanders? And what about the guy in Kentucky who assaulted Sen. Rand Paul? Did the Democratic Party’s unhinged rantings about hating on Republicans contribute to that attack?

Of course, the media and our political class will not admit it but the El Paso murders are for them a gift from God. Those murders support their narrative of the rise of white supremacy… and the badness of wanting to keep Mexican and Central American migrants out of the country.

And yet, if America has a crime problem, the fault does not lay entirely at the feet of white supremacists. While these two white men were committing mass murder, the city of Chicago was suffering its own killing sprees… unfortunately, such weekends are more the rule than the exception in Chicago.

The New York Times reports on what was happening in Chicago over the weekend:

While much of the nation’s attention was focused on the gun massacres in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, last weekend, Chicago was convulsed by its own burst of violence — the worst weekend the city has seen so far in 2019.

It was an extreme example of the routine but devastating gun violence, often related to gang conflicts, that cities like Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis experience on a regular basis. The police said seven people were killed and 52 wounded by gunfire throughout Chicago from Friday evening to Sunday, including a 5-year-old boy who was shot in the leg while sitting in a car.

Early Sunday, 17 people were shot in a period of two hours in a small pocket on the city’s West Side, turning residential blocks into chaotic scenes of ambulances, grieving family members and cars pockmarked with bullets.

Anyway, the American left has decided that Donald Trump is Hitler and that he must be destroyed. I trust you do not believe that this contributes to a culture of comity and amity. And they have all found an enemy that they are willing to fight: white supremacy.

Truth be told, the Obama administration and hid under the carpet when it came to fighting Islamist terrorism. Heck. Obama refused ever to pronounce the term. How much more cowardly can you get? Obama left Syria and Iraq to ISIS, traveled around the world declaring that the problem was America, as he put it on his infamous apology tour, or Islamophobia. For the record, Obama was not really apologizing for anything he himself had done. He was effectively indicting the nation and especially the group that had been running the nation until his advent. Let's see, in the psycho world people understand that if you strip people of their pride you cause them to feel angry. Duh.

Any time any Muslim terrorist murdered people during the Obama years, we were seriously warned that we ought not to think that this had anything to do with Islam. And that we must be seriously on guard against Islamophobia. The simple fact that the word “phobia” means fear, not hatred, never seems to bother anyone.

Did Obama’s weakness incite Islamist violence? Fair enough, Obama had far better control of his rhetoric than did Trump, but his actions bespoke a systemic cowardice. It was one reason why the American people repudiated the Democratic Party during the Obama years and it was one reason why they elected a take-no-prisoners candidate like Trump. You might believe that Trump’s bravado was more show than substance, but no one can say that he has not been willing to take risks, in both foreign and domestic policy. The weak-kneed Obama was notably risk averse.

So, the Democratic Party and the American left has a courage problem. It has a cowardice problem. It has a weakness problem. That is why its representatives always say that they are strong and that they are fighting. The trouble is, they are unwilling to fight against Islamist terrorism. And they refuse to do anything to protect the nation's borders.

So, they needed to find an enemy, someone they could hate with every fiber of their being. And that was, white supremacy. If white supremacy was as big a problem as the American left thinks it is, they would be cowering in the corner. Fair enough, white supremacist thinking and actions ought to be denounced, rejected and shut down. But, if you think that white supremacy is anywhere near as threatening to the world order as Islamic extremism, you are seriously detached from reality.

So, the people who are denouncing hatred are ginning up their own hatred, against Trump, against white supremacy, against Islamophobia. They give themselves license to hate and then they are outraged when others, people not of their ilk, accept the invitation and redirect the hate. 

There is nothing about hate that says that it’s good when directed against one team and bad when it’s directed against another. Hate does not know such subtle distinctions. It is a poison. Once it gets out of the bottle, you can no longer control where it goes to find expression. 

The solution to a culture of hate is to stop hating, to stop hating on anyone and to stop pretending that hate makes you tough and strong.