Las Vegas Shooting: Let's Blame Whitey

There's an especially sinister new theme permeating commentary on the recent spurt of publicity shootings. It is, in short, that these shootings are always the work of white men, and what, after all, can you expect from a bunch of white men?

Someone named Chauncey DeVega typed this screed:

"Mass shootings by white men, as well as right-wing domestic terrorism, have become events akin to those in the classic comedy Groundhog Day. Unfortunately, there is nothing humorous or funny about how white right-wing domestic terrorists have shot up Jewish community centers, planted bombs, seen a spike in their numbers since the election of Barack Obama, and are coddled and encouraged by the Fox News echo chamber and the Republican Party. And now with Tea Party regalia and Nazi bonafides, yelling "This is a revolution!" they killed three people during a brazen daylight attack in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas shooters were so contemptible that even the racist welfare king Cliven Bundy and his band of anti-Obama brigands, apparently felt they were too "radical" for their low tastes.

The right-wing echo chamber helped to spawn the mass shooters, named Jarad and Amanda Miller.

Birtherism, an embrace of the neo-confederacy, a worshipful attitude toward the Confederate flag (i.e. "the American Swastika") and the CSA, along with an open embrace of anti-black affect and white racial resentment in a concerted effort to delegitimize the United States' first black president, are the "polite" face of American white supremacy in the first decades of the 21st century.

The Republican Part (sic) is a white identity organization." 

Well.

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I suspect DeVega would regard it as niggling were one to point out that Navy Yard murderer Aaron Alexis was black, that D.C. sniper John Allen Mohammad was black and that Virginia Tech assassin Seung-Hui Cho was Korean. This game was given away when the New York Times labeled George Zimmerman a "white Hispanic."

If you lurk a bit on lefty websites like Gawker, Salon or Huffpost, you'll find that this blame-whitey theme has become pervasive. If you're reading this, you are most likely a white man, and you can, according to a lot of right-thinking opinion leaders, be blamed for racial oppression, pollution, suburban sprawl, income inequality, global warming, date rape, fast food, gentrification and just about anything else wrong with the world these days.

You might be surprised, and might think this is all a new development. No sir, like all other bad developments, it's been a long time coming.

Let's travel back to the early 1990s, when Dr. Leonard Jeffries was chairman of the black studies department at City College of New York. Jeffries propounded a theory that whites were "ice people" with a propensity to cruelty and oppression, while blacks were "sun people" naturally prone to cooperation and compassion.

He also advocated the melanin theory that argues black people have more of that skin-darkening natural polymer, and so are intellectually superior. He also was an anti-Semite who would have had Julius Streicher nodding in approval. The Jews, he said, financed the slave trade and ran a movie industry that reinforced white supremacy.

Jeffries' antics eventually led to his removal as department chairman, though he apparently is still employed as a professor at CUNY. Twenty years ago, his ideas were almost universally considered the rantings of a loon.

Today? Take a look at any left-leaning website and you'll find pretty much everything he said, albeit in sanitized and politically correct form. Go to any college and there are groups advocating divestment from Israel and ethnic and gender studies departments devoted to taking the white man down a peg or three.

So what? you may say: who cares what a lot of academics and bicoastal smartalecks think?

You should care, because they're completely altering the anti-gun narrative. For years, gun owners were characterized as a bunch of essentially harmless Fudds led astray by the evil NRA. Just educate them, it was said, and they'll meekly hand over the guns.

The new story line is that we are the hard core of an evil, oppressive racial group likely to strike out in any direction to preserve our undeserved privileges. We're not a group that can be reasoned with, and thereís no point in trying to persuade us. We're not misguided, we're just bad people who are prone to murder and mayhem. That's a whole different narrative, one that logically leads toward Auschwitz or Srebrenica or Rwanda.

It's not enough to stash an AR-15 and several cans of ammo and wear a Molon Labe T-shirt. If it gets to that point, it's too late. Now is the time to make liberal use of the First Amendment to call out the latter-day Leonard Jeffries clones who are inciting hate against us. One civil war is enough.