Montel Williams: Charlottesville terrorism exposes alt-right American Taliban
Reagan knew a president must fight homegrown hate with the fury of God’s own thunder. If Trump can't or won't provide that leadership, he should resign.
We face an existential threat from within in the form of the so called alt-right, which in reality is a loose confederation of Nazis, racists, bigots and anti-Semites. We ought to call them what they are: the American Taliban.
The ominous nature of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday cannot be understated or ignored. Some have said that there aren’t words, but there are words, some that can’t be printed in the newspaper. These events should shock our national conscience and lead us all to pause in sober reflection. Former vice president Joe Biden put it well when he tweeted, “There is only one side.”
Few things unite Americans these days, and I’m increasingly convinced the survival of democracy depends on a collective meditation on how we got to a place where we seem to have a president who calculates his response to an act of terrorism so as to not alienate the alt-right and its allies. We should remember that his self-described counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka (whose academic credentials with respect to terrorism are dubious at best), went on right-wing radio last week to argue that white nationalists aren’t a threat in order to justify a policy that pretends the only terrorist threat this country faces comes from jihadism.
At times like these, it’s important to tell the truth. The truth is that we didn’t get to a place where white supremacists laid siege to an American city and carried out an ISIS-style vehicular attack because of President Trump. This segment of society has always existed, but only on the margins. What Trump has to own is that he won the election by elevating white nationalists off the margins and treating the alt-right as if it were a legitimate political movement. Similarly, I think those who voted for Trump have to reflect on the fact that they’ve given their support to a candidate who can’t afford to lose the support of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
Again, in times of crisis, facts must win out over emotion. As a black American who grew up during Jim Crow, I understand the anger and the fear that so many are experiencing today. And as a Reagan conservative, I think it’s important to hold up Republicans who got it right last weekend and showed political courage.
Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska called the alt-right utterly revolting. House Speaker Paul Ryan called white supremacy a scourge and called for its terrorism to be confronted. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whom I’ve often criticized, wrote a must-read Facebook post that is both a devastating rebuke of hate and bigotry and a powerful affirmation of the principle of equality, possibly soft-launching a 2020 presidential run. Not surprisingly, the most devastating rebuke came from Arizona Sen. John McCain, who called out the alt-right as traitors.
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This is a dark time in our history. Nearly a half-million brave Americans died as a direct result of the global fight against fascism in World War II. I’d encourage my fellow Americans to reflect on that. The alt-right and its propaganda arms such as Breitbart, the Daily Stormer and others cannot be allowed to take us back to the kind of ideology that cost on the order of 60 million lives in World War II. Let us remember the terrible pictures of the concentration camps, let us all remember the horrors of apartheid South Africa — those are the end results of differing degrees of this kind of bigoted thinking, full stop.
Surely, the country I so proudly served for 22 years can do better than this in 2017. This was a chance for Trump to have a presidential moment and rally the country and with that, ironically, a chance to bolster the low poll numbers that clearly bother him.
When President Reagan faced this issue, albeit much smaller in scale, he launched a devastating attack on hate. Speaking to the NAACP in 1981, Reagan called the ideas held by white supremacists “perverted,” and in a famous speech accepting the nomination in 1984, he made it clear that there was no room for bigots in the party of Lincoln.
Reagan understood that an American president must have the courage to fight homegrown hate with the fury of God’s own thunder. If Trump cannot or will not provide that type of leadership, he should resign.
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If there’s one lesson we have to learn from what has happened, it’s that a large number of people hear “Make America Great Again” as “it’s OK to hate publicly and commit hate crimes again.” We’ve gotten to a point where it’s politically inexpedient for a U.S. president to call out neo-Nazism, white supremacy and bigotry as perverted ideologies whose adherents represent the very worst this country has to offer.
We saw in stark terms how dangerous our current political reality is. Perhaps it’s time we get about the business of the inevitable? Together we can eradicate this kind of extremism and its enablers from our national dialogue and forever brand them as traitors to the American ideals we hold to be self-evident.
Montel Williams, a 22-year veteran of the Marine Corps and Navy who served primarily as a special duty intelligence officer, went on to start the Emmy-award-winning Montel Williams Show that ran for 17 seasons. Follow him on Twitter @Montel_Williams
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