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This is what happens when your entire media apparatus treats white supremacy as an idea to be debated rather than a movement to be defeated.
We've seen a million versions of this argument over the past four years, from the "economic anxiety" explanation for Trump's win to the "isn't he dapper" profiles of neo-Nazis.
All of these stories promote the same narrative: White nationalism is just another idea in the realm of acceptable political discourse. It's gross, sure, but shouldn't we hear them out? Shouldn't we understand how they came to hold these views?
Attempts to marginalize and silence white nationalism — you know, the only way to defeat it — were cast as censorship. They were slotted into a counterfeit, Koch Brothers-funded nationwide "debate" about free speech.
The right latched on to this bullshit early and promoted it relentlessly. Establishment journalists played along, highlighting out the excesses of campus radicals and Black activists. They cast the movement to defeat white nationalism as a roughly equivalent threat.
So here we fucking are, a nation with democracy hanging by a thread. One of our political parties supports white nationalism in all but name. The other is addled by a decade of disingenuous rhetoric about the need to reach out, heal, find bipartisan compromise.
The only way to come back from this is to treat white supremacy as the cancer that it is. It is not a political idea. It is a malignant force with firmly established patterns and well-documented harms. Stopping it requires, as a first step, refusing to listen to it.
