If you don’t accept the Left’s agenda, you are most likely a “white nationalist.” That means there are a lot of white nationalists around today, but the Left has helpfully identified some of the gaulieters.
Milo Yiannopoulos is a practicing Catholic of Christian and Jewish heritage. Flamboyantly and unabashedly gay, he’s expressed an exclusive sexual preference for black men. Now you might think that a homosexual can’t be a white nationalist, but that just shows how much you know. They can too, says the Washington Post, because in that case they are “self-loathing homosexuals.”
Milo looks to be the least self-loathing person in the universe, but pay no attention to that. He’s still a fascist.
We’ve got a bit of a problem here, because we’ve been taught that fascists try to suppress free speech. Yet it’s the Leftists, the antifas and the Black Bloc that try to prevent Milo from speaking.
These gangs have beaten people up, smashed storefront windows (including Starbucks, a chain that caters to unemployed liberal basement dwellers who regularly shell out $5 for a cup of coffee), destroyed private property (including the limousine of a Pakistani immigrant driver). In this, they most resemble the prototypical German Nazis who brought us World War II.
So you might think it’s the Leftists who are the fascists here, but in reality it’s just the opposite, the WaPo tells us. Milo’s appearances on campus incite “many to clamp down on the free speech that is a fundamental right in this country.” In other words, Milo is suppressing free speech by exercising free speech. Pretty much in the same way as firemen invite arson.
Got that?
Steve Bannon hails from a working-class Irish Democrat family. He holds a bachelor’s degree in urban planning from Virginia Tech, a master’s in national security from Georgetown University, and an MBA from Harvard. His seven-year stint in the U.S. Navy included a position as special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon. Spanning the business and film worlds, he’s worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and as a producer, writer, and director of films in Hollywood.
Are the U.S. Navy, the New York investment banking world and Hollywood likely breeding places for white nationalism? There must be something else, another marker, and there is.
Before joining the Trump Administration, Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart News, which the Left identifies as the Berchtesgaden of white nationalism. Even so, Bannon made a curious hire: “Stephen K. Bannon is the man who flew to London to hire me, this brown guy called Raheem Kassam from a Muslim family to run his London operation, and he’s now put him in the seat on his radio show,” says the man hired to be Breitbart London’s editor-in-chief.
Bannon’s political views are said to have been influenced, in part, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-American author of The Black Swan. For a white nationalist, Bannon seems to have an unseemly affinity for folks of Lebanese descent.
Michael Anton is a brilliant 47-year old of Italian and Lebanese (there we go again!) background. He’s a graduate of the illustrious Claremont Graduate University and the French Culinary Institute of New York. A Renaissance man, he’s written scholarly essays on Tom Wolfe, The Beach Boys, his teacher Harry V. Jaffa, Machiavelli, Napa Valley wines, the mystery genre in American literature, food, and more. As the pseudonymous Nicholas Antongiavanni, he wrote The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, a sartorial application of The Prince to men’s fashion.
You probably thought that fascists were not to be found in a culinary school. Wrong! You never heard of Vichy water? Escargots Maréchal Pétain? Canard aux collabos?
Anton used to write for American Greatness (and other places) under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. He was working for a New York investment banking firm (again!) at the time and feared, correctly, that writing articles in support of Donald Trump would get him fired. This is a fear shared by many scholars and writers employed in academia—or who wish to be—which is why it was so difficult for Frank Buckley of George Mason University’s law school (who happens to be my husband) to find 160 of them who were willing to stand up for free speech and publish under their real names to form a group called Writers and Scholars for Trump. Many more refused to sign. One of them was so frightened that he might be associated with Trump that he immediately deleted all of his pro-Trump Facebook postings.
Breitbart News, according to the Huffington Post, is “a news site known for promoting white supremacist and anti-Semitic views, which openly supported Trump’s election.” Openly? First HuffPo criticizes Anton for publishing under a pseudonym and then it criticizes Breitbart News for supporting Trump openly!
Breitbart’s founder was Andrew Breitbart, the adopted son of a woman who converted to Judaism on marrying his adoptive father. Andrew openly embraced his Judaism. “I’m glad I’ve become a journalist because I’d like to fight on behalf of the Israeli people… And the Israeli people, I adore and I love,” he once said. Before his death, he was a friend of Arianna Huffington and set up her website. One might have thought that being a Jewish supporter of the Jewish state would be inconsistent with being a white nationalist, but one would be wrong, evidently.
Joel Pollak, also Jewish, is Breitbart’s senior editor. He received a degree in Jewish Studies from the University of Cape Town before going on to Harvard Law School. He’s married to a black South African woman, Julia, whose mother was one of Nelson Mandela’s political appointees. They have two mixed-race children. But this didn’t fool the folks at CNN who accused him of being afraid of black people.
It gets harder and harder to figure out what makes a person a white nationalist. But it’s safe to say that if you don’t embrace the Left’s agenda, you’re more likely to qualify. And the burden is on you to prove you aren’t one.
So I asked Michael Anton whether he could prove that he wasn’t a white nationalist. Anton takes all questions seriously. He pondered for a few minutes before responding, in a tone of genuine bewilderment: “I didn’t think that a Straussian could be a white nationalist.”
Like many at Anton’s alma mater—the university, not the cooking school—he is a student of Leo Strauss. According to the Journal of First Principles, Straussians “engage in a ‘close reading’ of the ‘Great Books’ of political thought; they strive to understand a thinker ‘as he understood himself’; they are unconcerned with questions about the historical context of, or historical influences on, a given author.”
Aha! A school of thought that looks at the elegance, logic and coherence of ideas without considering the gender, color, sociological, anthropological, class, ethnic and other biases that might have beset their authors! That would be like reading a poem just to appreciate its beauty and craftsmanship. That right there is pretty suspect!
Not satisfied, though, I consulted the proudly white nationalist website, Stormfront.org, from which I came away not at all certain of who qualifies as “white.” According to the site, “white” includes only “Non-Jewish people of wholly European descent. No exceptions.” Note the word “wholly.” Stormfront.org refuses to quibble. If you have to ask if you’re white, they’ll tell you you’re not.
“Michael Anton wouldn’t qualify since he’s one-eighth Lebanese,” I informed my husband. “And as a Jew, I wouldn’t qualify either.”
“What if you told them you were a self-loathing Jew?” he offered helpfully.
As someone of mixed Irish and German descent, my husband would qualify, though he was shocked to learn that the Italians and the Irish were considered to be “white.”
So would Donald Trump meet Stormfront’s standards? I honestly don’t know. He’s a genuine WASP, of German and Scottish descent. But then look at the people he fraternizes with. And he’s openly proud of all his Jewish grandchildren. How many of the Leftist Jews who call him a white nationalist can say they have Jewish grandchildren?
But it’s dinnertime now, and I have to cook up some fascist food.