When People Show You Who They Are? Believe Them

I’ll freely admit it.

Even I was warming up to Corey Stewart, up to this point.

…but let’s be honest: the Democratic Party of Virginia’s call for people to denounce Prince William County Chairman Corey Stewart’s recent comments about Mexicans has nothing to do with any sort of care or concern about Hispanic communities.  They want votes, they want to raise money off of the OUTRAGE! (TM).

That is exceptionally lame.

If interested, you can read Stewart’s comments here.  Let’s be honest — if Stewart had said all this with a smile, if he had said this diplomatically, would anyone on the perpetually offended left have given a single ounce of damn?

Of course they wouldn’t.

Frankly, what Stewart is condemning here isn’t racism — Stewart is condemning violence.  Read the Facebook comment again without the media filter:

Time to put our foot down. These hoodlums attacked Trump supporters because they don’t like our views. These Trump supporters could have been you or your family. Are we going to tolerate this? If you tolerate thuggery, you will get more of it.

When I am governor, thugs like these will be apprehended and, if they are illegal, we will kick their asses out of the country, just like we did in Prince William County.

So where’s the outrage?  That the “thugs” in question are Hispanic?  That Stewart will “kick their asses out of the country” (as opposed to the Coke-and-a-smile variety of deportation)?

One might take umbrage with the idea that a crowd of Hispanics seems to sine qua non include illegal immigrants.  Fair enough.  This sentiment is precisely the line that separates a true concern for immigration policy over the rank nativism that seems to have infected the discussion.

At a conversation at the University of Virginia over race relations and the concept of “honor” we were shown this video to describe that the antidote to racism was not non-racism (i.e. not recognizing the concept of race), but rather anti-racism.  Worth watching even if you initially disagree with the concept:

It dawned on me that the prescription of knocking people off the non-racial fence during the Obama era did more than just create anti-racists.  Sometimes folks fall that way… but when racial consciousness goes the other way?  They fall towards something else — a pro-racial sentiment.

I’m not suggesting in the slightest that Stewart is expressing a pro-racial sentiment here (readers may divine such things as they may).  What I am suggesting is that we are witnessing a public official who is grappling with a movement within the left to knock people off the fence — not between racial and non-racial, but between anti-racial and pro-racial, and what Stewart is effectively saying is that he rejects the implicit violence within that argument.  Not here, not in Prince William, and not in Virginia.

Effectively, what Stewart is objecting to and publicly struggling with — and rightly, upon reflection — is the violence (or approximation of violence) that is driving us away from a nationally accepted dream as old as Martin Luther King, Jr., a vision growing dimmer as the racially re-charged atmosphere of the last eight years seems to be gripping America.

That — perhaps most of all — is what makes Trumpism so utterly dangerous at the end of the day; it is indeed reactionary against the violence of the left, spun up by social media and painting with as broad a brush as possible to label “the other” as something they might not be in a coffee shop or as individuals calmly sharing their concerns.  Today’s politics doesn’t reward understanding, but it surely rewards outrage and brinkmanship.

Maya Angelou used to remark that when people show you who they are, believe them the first time.  Perhaps the politically charged left knows that by knocking non-racists off the fence, they will create both anti-and pro-racists?  Perhaps they were waiting to catch Stewart in that net and overplayed the hand?  Certainly DPVA has done everything to make sure they try, haven’t they?

More to the point, Stewart expressed an opinion that most Americans are expressing — a disdain for violence in politics.  Certainly that is laudable.  If the Democrats have simply conflated leftist violence with a presupposed racial reaction from the right?  Perhaps that simply reveals how many moves they are thinking down the chessboard.  So be it — but that’s on them, not Stewart.

For one, this has opened a terrifying bit of insight as to where the Democrats intend to follow up.  I believe them.  Likewise, setting aside the tone?  Stewart’s larger point that violence in politics should not be trusted or applauded is notable in itself — despite the words chosen to express the sentiment.  I believe him, even if I cannot bring myself to condone the “throw their asses out” line… we don’t have to be them in order to beat them, after all.

…but the longer he (and others) lend their reputations to Donald Trump’s reactionary movement?  The more they inextricably link themselves to the reaction certain others on the left are practically begging the reactionary and populist right to perform.

One worries that Trumpism will be more than happy to oblige — in due time.  I believe them as well.