It's been a year since Nazis marched in Charlottesville. They killed a counterprotester, Heather Heyer, by running her over in a car. They openly shot at and attacked Black people while police watched. They chanted about Jews never "replacing" them.
Some things I want to remember about this:
- Antifa, who people had been wringing their hands about after a hero rightly punched Richard Spencer,
saved the lives of a church group and of Cornell West.
- Our garbage president said there were good people on "both sides", normalizing and endorsing overt racism in a very pure form.
- Whites on the left (not all, of course) had this "too bad so sad; let's move on, and let's not inconvenience me by potentially curtailing my "free speech" response. Like Trump, they normalized this. (Incidentally,
free speech does not mean you can say and do anything you want with disregard to consequence.) This was a reaction from both newspaper columns and Whites that I knew. Even after witnessing this, they wanted a "debate", as if they were shitty software that could only classify action along one dimension. I remember a guy talking about how important it was to look reasonable to Trump voters, the
day after this.
That day, I got the illusions I held about the reach of white supremacy knocked the fuck out of my head. Yes, Whites wearing swastikas hitting Black people with sticks is important to white supremacy. But in order for it have effects beyond that direct harm and to enable that direct harm to happen again, it needs cover from "reasonable-looking" Whites - especially Whites on the left - who throw out whatabouts and make sure that focus is taken away from that harm and moved to more abstract discussions. These people don't wish harm upon people of color; they just don't view their right to exist with dignity and safety the same way they view their own.
All that said,
Reveal has reported some positive fallout from the event in the last year."A lot of the white supremacists who were there were initially very excited about what had happened at Charlottesville," Pitcavage said. "Very quickly, that elation turned to dismay, as almost the whole country – almost the whole country, not necessarily the White House – united to condemn this event, and a lot of prominent people ended up getting deplatformed and doxxed and losing their jobs and kicked out of university."
The whining from the developers of Gab is particularly hilarious in response to Microsoft asking them to take down two posts:
Centralized control of internet infrastructure is the biggest threat to individual freedom online. They told us to "build our own" if we didn’t like Big Social’s policies. We did, so now they are attacking us at the internet infrastructure level. We will keep fighting and building to ensure a future for free expression and individual liberty online for everyone.
Azure is "internet infrastructure," eh? How did web services exist five years ago? What incredibly entitled little shits. Maybe your pedophile pal Milo knows of some servers you can put your garbage on, Nazis.