Now that Trevor Noah’s interview with far-right sorority girl Tomi Lahren is nearly a week old, liberals feel content with Noah’s mature treatment of Lahren. Their measured, logical approach to dealing with this country’s mass organization of fanatical racists has clearly been a smashing success.
Another dose of joking around with racists on national television could prove disastrous.
“Normalization” doesn’t even begin to describe what Noah has done. Especially in the case of Lahren, who, to the Editorial Board, is more dangerous than someone like Richard Spencer, the chief ideologue of the contemporary white nationalist movement and president of the National Policy Institute.
Because Lahren is a young woman, the stereotypical view of white nationalism being dominated by men shatters. Though it is naïve to say that white women can’t be ardent racists, the contemporary expansion to include young white women is undoubtedly an alarming development.
If one watches Trevor Noah’s interview, they will find an expose on how American liberalism has failed to stop the proliferation of white nationalism. The fallacy that Noah and other liberals indulge in repeatedly is to assume that people like Lahren can be dealt with through logic and rational argument.
Noah spends the entire interview pinning down the question of “Is she racist?”. This is amazing considering that seconds before she had called Black Lives Matters “militant” and the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” slogan a “false narrative.”
Yet, Noah doesn’t once flat out call her a racist or harshly refute the insanity coming out of her mouth. Instead, he goes into the liberal cliché of giving a pretentious monologue logically explaining how what Lahren says is false. If people like Lahren understood or cared for logic, reason and basic humanity, they wouldn’t be a white nationalist.
We have lost so much ground to white nationalism in the last year and a half because we have passively accepted them. They are well organized, ruthless and hateful and have taken over the country because any hypothetical opposition has refused to fight fire with fire.
The Huffington Post has a comprehensive article called “My Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right.” Though the article was written a few days before the election, its introduction is now ominous: “I went to a white nationalist ethnostate in Indiana. I got bounced from a secret meeting in D.C. I spent weeks figuring out how hate gurgles up from the nastiest recesses of the Internet. And I’m sorry to report that unconscionable racists will be a force in American politics well beyond November 8.”
The diagnosis is clear — white nationalism has become potent enough to fabricate an expansive internet culture. It has symbols, heroes, villains, language and vision.
Its ideology even goes beyond race, harkening back to the reactionaries of the French Revolution. It is anti-democratic, monarchist and demanding of exaltation to the state, military, leader and nation.
There is no other force in America quite like it, and that is why it has succeeded. Noah’s preoccupation with the question “Is Tomi Lahren racist?” now seems even more ridiculous.
Lahren’s blind, religious-like obedience to the police and American flag, along with her incessant spewing of racist stupidity should instantly answer that question for Noah and other liberals, who choose to deal with Lahren and her cohorts with jokes and rationality.
These tactics have gotten us nowhere. Another futile social media post denouncing these people is not going to stop them.
