There’s an old punk canard that if you walk into a venue where Nazis are hanging out and no one minds, you are in a Nazi venue. There’s also the one that goes, “What do you call it when you sit down at a table with nine Nazis? Ten Nazis.”
Same holds true for the Proud Boys. If you’re at a rally where Proud Boys are a welcome and unchallenged part of the audience, then you are at a rally where Proud Boys are welcome. So, if you headed down to The Daily Wire’s “Rally to End Child Mutilation” on Friday, and you stood in the crowd next to Proud Boys, congratulations. You have picked a side.
The same goes for all the politicians who showed up there. In their coverage of Friday's event, the Scene’s Hannah Herner and Matt Masters identified state Sen. Jack Johnson, state House Majority Leader William Lamberth, state Sen. Dawn White, state Sen. Ed Jackson and state Sen. Janice Bowling, as well as U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, all at this rally with Proud Boys in attendance. I could not find any reporting that any of these politicians denounced the Proud Boys or refused to speak until they left.
Just to be clear, you can be a member of a group that organized “Unite the Right” with a whole bevy of white supremacists, a group that helped organize and participate in the Jan. 6 insurrection, a group that coalesced in the first place around a man with criminally ridiculous facial hair, and you can show up at a political rally in Nashville, and the most powerful Republicans in the state will be all, “Hey, cool, I’ll go talk to that crowd.”
The idea that this motley crew of politicians and right-wing media is going to protect children from anything when they can’t even stand up to Proud Boys is hilarious. And they’re palling around with Matt Walsh, a dude who said the following out loud about teen pregnancy: “What I'm saying, though, is that if society was, if society was different and that we stopped insisting that you're a kid until you're 25 and we just deal with the reality that at about 16, you're an adult who is mature and can make decisions — you are that at 16. I don't care what anybody says.” And he's now saying that 16-year-old kids shouldn’t be able to make decisions about their own bodies.
Does anyone in that crowd even have a consistent worldview?
Well, you know, maybe Marsha Blackburn does. She spoke to Proud Boys at this rally on Friday. Saturday she tweeted David Duke’s old campaign slogan, “America First.” America First is a political ideology older than Duke, of course. You can see pictures of Klanswomen in New York marching under its banner in the 1920s. And you can see Florida Klanswomen holding a handmade sign with the same slogan from the 1970s. So Marsha’s just out here showing who she is with her whole self.
Prominent Nashville do-gooder David Dark has been trying very hard to get the people of Tennessee to make these kinds of connections. He has a piece over at Religion News Service trying to put a name to what he’s seeing:
Association is currency. How we spend it and how we get spent matters. To highlight, examine and pose questions about these men’s political moves will draw unwelcome attention to their public witness and their moral legacies, yes. But this is necessary due diligence — into the decisions, the messy alliances and the conservative Christian nationalistic milieu that is taking over in Tennessee and beyond. ...
That’s a lot to hold in our heads and hearts, but if we don’t name the complicated, interlocking incitements to violence being carried out by our elected officials and their famous enablers, it’s easier to keep pretending what’s happening isn’t happening.
I agree with what David’s struggling with here, but I think it’s a little more complicated. There are plenty of people who see exactly what’s happening, who have seen for years, who have spoken out for years, and whose testimony has not been valued.
Do you think any Black person in Tennessee is surprised to see white politicians speaking to members of hate groups? Do you think any Muslim Tennesseans are surprised? Any Hispanic Tennesseans? Our sheriff went and spoke to a white supremacist organization after his department shackled a woman to her bed while she was giving birth, and more than a decade later, he’s still the sheriff.
The alarm is ringing. And it has been ringing. For decades. For centuries. The United States was born with those alarm bells ringing.
I, for one, am not surprised that our state legislators are willing to speak to Proud Boys. They do so much to support white supremacy already that this is just par for the course. They are on the side of insurrectionists who don’t believe in the Union. (And let me stress: again.)
But what of it? And I don’t mean this question to be flippant. I think it’s the hard question at the center of all of this. Even if we could get every white person in Tennessee to verbally acknowledge what was right in front of our faces, do we think that would change enough minds to get them to vote differently (or vote at all)?
In a way, all this effort to convince white people to just please start living by the values you espouse only serves to reinforce the idea that white people are so important that the state and the country ought to hold up all progress until we’re comfortable with it.
It’s been 246 years. I think it’s safe to assume that we all know what sides we stand on. Either you’re committed to a government by the people, of the people, and for the people, or you’re not. And all these folks are telling us they’re not. Let’s just believe them rather than expecting they can be reasoned out of it.
