Posted on January 7, 2017

American Renaissance Fuels Leftist Infighting

Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, January 7, 2016

When I wrote “The Anti-Anti-White Left,” I did not think much would come of it. To my surprise, it took off almost immediately, with a comments thread so fiery I felt compelled to write a reply. Now a few weeks have passed and it has been read by quite a few leftists, who are now using it as ammunition to accuse each other of racism.

On January 4th, Viewpoint magazine published an essay, “The Safety Pin and the Swastika” that, among other things, pooh-poohed  my prediction that some anti-anti-white leftists could become white advocates. The author, Shuja Haider, claims that I am wrong because anti-anti-white leftists view the world in a more or less colorblind way, making them invulnerable to appeals to racial identity. Mr. Haider goes on to claim that it is the race-obsessed social justice warriors (SJWs) who are most like us, saying that the alt-right is just the other side of the same identitarian coin. He implied that SJWs are fueling the alt-right.

Like other leftists, Mr. Haider favors class identity over race in order to build a multi-racial unified base that will defeat the corporations, the military-industrial complex, evangelical false consciousness, etc. He thinks that if that happened, white advocacy would disappear because it would lose its biggest enemies: racial figures such as Al Sharpton and Peggy McIntosh. If it doesn’t happen, Mr. Haider implies, SJWs will fuel further white resentment, which will cause whites to leave the left en masse, which will lead to defeat after defeat for the left.

Viewpoint is an obscure, Marxian publication. Mr. Haider’s article was immediately picked up by the much better known Marxian site, Jacobin.

The very next day, Think Progress published a very different essay, “The center has fallen, and white nationalism is filling the vacuum.” The author, Ned Resnikoff, quoted my anti-anti-white left article, but unlike Mr. Haider, he agreed with it: Socialist anti-anti-whites are potential white advocates. His point was, to paraphrase, “Look, even the racists have a soft spot for socialists who read Jacobin. This shows they and many Bernie Sanders supporters really are racists.”

Unlike Jacobin, which is independently funded, Think Progress is very much part of the progressive “establishment.” It is a project of the Center for American Progress, a think tank founded by John Podesta that is an important arm of the Clinton Empire. Many Sanders supporters think that Mrs. Clinton’s loss proves that their man should have gotten the nomination. They blame the Clinton wing of the party for the Democrat’s defeat, because they claim (quite plausibly) that Sen. Sanders would have held onto the Rust Belt and become president. This Think Progress essay is an indirect rebuttal of this view that says, in effect, “Get lost, you racist Bernie Bros. Clintonism is the way forward.”

So in the span of 48 hours, two different popular leftist websites quoted American Renaissance in order to attack each other. Leftwing Twitter went nuts, as the Clintonitess and Bernie Bros lashed out at one another. The SJWs called the Marxians racist, the Marxians called the SJWs corporate tools who know nothing of poverty. Some contributed to the debate by claiming that the debate itself is pointless. Here are some highlights:

 


[“poc” means “people of color,” “woc” means “woman of color”]

[“lmao” means “laughing my ass off”]

My turn of phrase may have even caught on because of all this:

Jamelle Bouie, a black Slate writer and one of the most anti-white writers in the country, loved the Think Progress piece:

Some folks noted the pathetic disunity of it all: