On September 23, David Menzies of Canada’s Rebel Media introduced the world to yet another idiot professor of whose existence it had previously been innocent. Cynthia Levine-Rasky, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, had written a letter to the editor to Toronto’s cooler-than-thou alternative weekly, Now, which was basically a billet doux to Antifa. “Many people,” she wrote, “are critical of the anti-fascist activists who protest white nationalist rallies….But they are taking risks that the rest of us will not.” They “mask up because white nationalists photograph and film them so they can identify them and attack them online and otherwise. Many anti-fascist protestors are young people with a lot to lose, including their jobs, their housing, their health, their future. We need to stop labelling these front-line activists since surely all of us are against white supremacy.”
Where to start? With the fact that “white nationalist rallies” of any significant size in North America are a fever dream of the far left, whose savviest members know very well that “white nationalism” is a chimera, even if a good many of the white, upper-middle-class college students and trust-fund malingerers who make up most of Antifa actually seem to believe, on some childlike, unreflecting level, that they are at war with millions of rabid racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. Second, the conduct of Antifa makes it clear that they, and nobody else, are the major fascist phenomenon in North America today. They are not fighting fascists. They are fighting conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, moderates, you name it – anyone who may happen to disagree with their radical lockstep boilerplate. They “mask up” because they do not have the courage of their convictions. If they really were brave, they wouldn’t give a toss about losing their jobs or housing. Their convictions are play convictions. They may think they are valiant fighters against capitalism, but they are sunlight warriors, summertime Spartacuses, playpen rebels, gathering en masse to smash the windows of Starbucks branches at which they may well later turn up, maskless, to order a cafe latte grande.
Of course the argument that North America in 2018 is rife with white supremacism is based largely on a single event – the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 between motley crews of rightist and leftist activists. Yes, some of the rightists who were there were extremists – some were even neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Some of the leftists, in the same way, were Stalinists, Maoists, anarchists. Neither extreme is attractive. Neither is conducive to individual freedom and intellectual diversity. But one thing is clear. The extreme right in America today is an extremely minimal and marginal phenomenon. The KKK’s heyday is long past. The neo-Nazis are not about to take over the U.S. By contrast, the radical left is thriving. Only Clinton-level political machinations prevented a socialist, Bernie Sanders, from winning the Democratic Party 2016 nomination for president of the United States.
But Levine-Rasky doesn’t buy this. In a recent article, she argued that white supremacists are a clear and present danger, and noted that white supremacism was certainly a real power earlier in the history of the U.S. and Canada. She pointed out, for example, the onetime popularity of eugenics programs, which aggressive promoted birth control as a means of keeping down the reproduction of nonwhites. She’s right to indicate that this sort of thinking was indeed widespread back in the day. What she neatly omits to mention is that eugenics, as preached by Margaret Sanger and others, was an integral part not of conservative political programs but, rather, of the progressive movement that led to the formation of the modern American welfare state. The determination of progressives to make use of modern science to limit the number of black babies was rooted in the very same totalitarian urge to control and restrict that undergirds today’s Antifa movement.
Levine-Rasky makes a big deal out of the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, subscribed to this kind of thinking, but she omits to even admit that leftist heroes Wilson and FDR were far more worried about “polluting” of white America with the blood of other “races” than Teddy Roosevelt was. It should be recalled that Wilson, despite his image as a liberal-minded academic intellectual, was a vicious segregationist, while FDR locked up Japanese-Americans during World War II and refused to allow Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany into the U.S. In American today, the progressive obsession with group identity that made possible Wilson’s and FDR’s ugliest policies still exists not in today’s GOP but in the party of Obama and the Clintons – but you would never know that from Cynthia Levine-Rasky.