All the White Anger That is Fit to Print
The Unprinted Anger of Minorities
I was actually outraged by no news. The day one politician threatened to kill a colleague and an opposing leader, I headed to that ‘liberal rag,’ The New York Times, to hear their take on the subject. Nothing. What was bursting out on all the media news channels that I saw clips of on YouTube, the NYTimes has nothing to say. They didn’t even cover the story, a longtime elitist subscriber. Two days later, today, Veteran’s Day, they covered something that sounds like a threatening mob of violence in this headline: House Republicans Who Backed Infrastructure Bill Face Vicious Backlash.
Why can’t a known white supremacist politician gain a bigger headline when threatening to murder a minority woman co-worker than angry white republicans mad at other white republicans?
It may not be obvious that I’m talking about Arizona Republican White Man Paul Gosar releasing his video masterpiece on Twitter showing him killing New York Latino American Woman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC. In his fantasy imagining he goes on to kill President Joseph Biden. Right after the release of his modern sequel to this Birth of a Nation blockbuster, named perhaps Purifying of a Nation, Mr. Gosar got a visit from the real Secret Service. They deemed it important to investigate a credible threat to the President.
And what could be more credible in a time of Trumpism than having a known white supremacist threaten the president and a member of Congress. Why not twice in one year — jokingly of course — try to kill AOC?
Well, I would have said he is white supremacist sympathizer, but his previous tweets indicate he is not sympathizing but proselytizing. Indeed, Gosar is one of the key organizers of the Great Insurrection. Trump called his crowd to action, and Gosar along with Reps Biggs and Brooks, met with Ali Alexander to ‘Stop the Steal,’ which led to ‘Invade the Capitol.’
Being a white sore loser and a bully has its privileges. When Gosar then threatens and proselytizes to kill a well-regarded Latino Woman, in continuation of the campaign he began 11 months ago, the NYTimes goes quiet. For an answer to why they choose not to cover Congressional co-worker violence and harassment at all, even in the editorials, and why the story died down 24 hours later to nothing by the third day in mainstream media, we are left guessing.
Because this story isn’t that important? Because seeing politicians threatening to kill Latino leaders is normal and thus not interesting? Watching a short “anime” video of Mr. Gosar’s rich fantasy life is not the same thing as actually issuing a verbal threat? Because women minorities know how to endure such ‘playful’ musings by rich white men?
Take your pick. I’ll take mine: the extremist violence threatened by white men in power on the right is so normalized that it isn’t worth a mention.
The NYTimes focus on mob violence — such as white extremists from the proverbial trailer park calling in to lash out on radio at Republican representative Adam Kinzinger because he voted for Biden’s road building bill — is justified. ‘Liberal’ readers accept white-on-white violence as OK to read about. But Times subscribers can’t stomach reading direct threats by someone who tried to overturn the November vote of Trump, a stark reminder that no one has been held accountable for their stated desire and organized action to overturn our democracy?
Yet the problem revealed to me is not that the Times and the American media is liberal but that it is centrist. The constant news of a white male politician’s video of being played over and over and over again of him killing a Latino leader, if it went on for days, would inflame Trump supporters and Fox News viewers — who of at the same time would say that it was a “joke” and “just a cartoon.”
What a strange joke: watching a white supremacist kill a Latino woman over and over and over again on the internet. Oh, those libtards, they have no sense of humor.
If we were all forced to watch it every day as a country and focus on it, the laughter would quickly die, the humor fade, and we would just see him every day killing her over and over and over again.
But the bigger problem is the centrists. They don’t want to be reminded constantly on a forty-eight hour or 72 hours or longer, that a Latino woman representing the ‘poor’ side of town was threatened to be killed by a white supremacist. Somehow, that would taint the news and offend centrists, perhaps leaving them with the sensation they are reading a socialist paper about the poor.
Instead, I am left to following other news, listening to how all the mainstream media signal that Rittenhouse will be acquitted and how violent the right-wing mob is in reacting to the infrastructure repair bill by repeating the language of the angry Trump-wing whites against the 13 who voted for it.
Here’s a list of the violent phrases and words from The NY Times article on the angry whites so you can see the anger that white centrist journalists use: “vicious” “traitors”, “rot in hell”, “inundated with angry messages,” “flooded by menacing messages from voters”, “toxic”, “slash-and-burn politics,” “frequent threats,” “intraparty warfare,” “thousand angry and threatening calls,” “multiple death threats”, “visceral nature of the backlash”, “striking”, “poisoned,” “scapegoated,” “blasted out,” “targeted”, “blew up,” “damaging political consequences,” exacerbated,” “undercutting.”
Here’s the acceptable phrases and words The NYTimes used to describe Latino, minority, and women’s anger about their progressive left-wing reaction to the threat by an extremist white leader to murder one of their own, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, over the same two-day period: “________________________”.
Did you hear that? The silence is defining, and deafening, drowned out by the angry white male language they published. That white violence — even if you hate the white-wing that prompted it, as they believe their readers do — is abundant in the news language.
It is all the acceptable news that is “fit to print.”
