‘The Roots Of White Rage’
There is a really quite good article on white anxiety politics up at Mother Jones:
This is why last summer’s Fox-fest of xenophobia — Shirley Sherrod, the Ground Zero mosque, the New Black Panthers, anchor babies, liberation theology, etc. etc. — was so effective. It’s also why all the birther nonsense is so powerful. Without the constant drumbeat of racially charged crap from the likes of Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Dinesh D’Souza, it might just be a fringe curiosity. But with it, it gets a patina of intellectual support that turns it into a dangerous and mainstream belief.
Everybody involved in this pretends to be outraged if you point out what they’re doing. But anyone with a pulse can see what’s going on. And guess what? Summer is coming! There’s no midterm election in the offing, so maybe Fox News will decide to cool it on the xenophobia front this year. But then again, maybe not. Nobody on the right really called them out on this last year, and there doesn’t seem to be any real limit to their shamelessness. So maybe they’ll try it again. It seems to be pretty good for ratings, after all.
I have to quibble with one little part of the article, where Kevin Drum, the writer, says “Nobody on the right really called them out on this last year, and there doesn’t seem to be any real limit to their shamelessness.” That’s not exactly true. David Frum did. So did Christopher Hitchens, and so did Charles Johnson, the founder of this site.
And all three of them are now personas non gratas for the right. Go figure.