It seems curious how, in the wake of the recent act of domestic terrorism at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, conservative America is falling all over itself to distract from the fact that racism was the primary motivating factor influencing the terrorist, focusing instead on various bullshit angles such as his mental health (which is all speculation, by the way), his drug use, the self-victimization fantasy that it was an attack on religion and not black people, or perhaps the vilest of them all, some NRA scumbag’s insistence that somehow the act of terrorism was the fault of the Pastor at the Church, Clementa Pinckney, because he believed in gun control.
But, it’s not curious that they’re trying to move the dialogue away from race when you think of it in light of the fact that these are the very people whose rhetoric mirrors the ideology found in the Charleston right-wing terrorist’s lame whiney rant that has been dubbed a ‘manifesto’ by the media, but really amounts to nothing more than an ignorant, lame, whining, sniveling rant.
It’s not curious at all when you read that the seeds of the terrorist’s thinking were not planted by exposure to ‘extremist’ groups existing far outside the mainstream of sociopolitical thought in this country, but by exposure to the prevailing right-wing consensus that Trayvon Martin ‘deserved it,’ that all the unarmed black people murdered by police ‘deserved it,’ and that institutional racism is a thing of the past and in its place we have a growing climate of oppression against white Americans (as ridiculous as that may sound to those of us who use our brains when we think). This is the cultural background from whence the terrorist was borne.
In that regard I propose we immediately cease calling these people ‘conservatives’ as this is too polite a word to describe them, and carries with it an aura of partial respectability, albeit a severely diminished one. The true word for these ideological terrorists should be ‘regressives.’ While this may sound like too polite a term to use to reference people whose views directly lead to extreme acts of terror like those in Charleston, I feel it’s essential to use a term that they can not just easily dismiss as an epithet, but will instead force them to confront the fact that, frankly, it’s a perfect term to describe everything they stand for.
The time has come to start letting these people know that their views have no place in a civilized society’s 21st century, and that we demand to live in a civilized society. It’s time to stop being polite with America’s regressives and to stop pretending like their dangerous and destructive discourse is anything more than the festering, infected, ideological sore upon our socius that it most certainly is.
It’s time to take this country back, for the first time.
