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Appearing last week on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” part-time Republican/part-time Democrat Linda Chavez labeled as “white nationalists” those who support President Trump, or who are anti-anti Trump. In fact, anyone who believes in defending America’s borders is rooting for the return of a nation bound by the blood of the fatherland:
CHAVEZ: One of the things that bothers me is we always talk about this in terms of white nationalism and white supremacy but what’s happening in the conservative movement, at least a wing of the conservative movement is even more disturbing.
They dropped the word, white, but nationalism is the rage now on the right. And you have, you know, heretofore respectable publications like the Claremont Review of Books and somebody like Chris DeMuth who used to head up AEI and was once at OMB, out there promoting nationalism as a proper ideology. You have the President himself talking about turning us into a nationalist nation.
This has got sort of an ugly precedent, ugly strain, and of course we’re seeing it elsewhere and when they talk about nationalism, they are talking about a nation as defined by blood and soil. And so it’s people who are here, who could trace their ancestry back to England and to the British Isles, and it’s based on, you know, our geographic residence.
SANDERS: White people.
CHAVEZ: Yes.
Not to put a too fine point on it, but after Chavez accused Chris DeMuth and the Claremont Review of Books of being crypto-white nationalists, she then agreed with the social justice warrior sitting across from her that somehow white people on the Right are “all the rage” for “blood and soil” to make America racially homogenous.
Huh? Just where is the evidence for this? Chavez makes these allegations constantly, but never offers evidence.
Even more troubling, is the intellectual buzzsaw taken to the word “nationalism.” Pundits these days—especially those supposedly on the Right—seem incapable of making distinctions between fascists, Nazis, and National Socialists. Though Nazis were both fascists and National Socialists, not every fascist is a Nazi. But never mind. Facts are not important. For Chavez, Fascist equals Nazi equals “blood and soil” equals nationalist equals Trump. Got it? It’s clear as day! Forget that Winston Churchill had a fuller understanding: “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism . . . As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements.”
The sad fact is, it is Chavez, not Trump, who peddles in race politics. When she is not lending credence to the fake Trump-Russia collusion narrative, she’s been profiling the president and his supporters as nationalist Trumpkins. That’s astonishing since she condemns race hoaxes. Even so, she has repeated the Charlottesville hoax and insisted that Trump said white nationalists were “fine people” when the record clearly shows that he did no such thing: “You had people and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too.” (Emphasis added.)
Funny how Chavez never gets around to noting Trump’s actual words, isn’t it? But that would not matter since everything he says is, apparently, a lie.
It is sad that Chavez seems to think that we cannot have a deliberation about nationalism (that is Americanism). If nationalism is so bad, then why do we have the United Nations? Is that a racist organization, too? If enforcing borders means endorsing white nationalism, then is Chavez in favor of borderless world government? Chavez loathes Trump for not being like Ronald Reagan, but it was Reagan who wanted to return America to greatness. He was not talking about a borderless nation; his was a defense of the nation.
Chavez repeatedly engages in commentary wherein she claims she knows the heart of her opponents. Trump’s words don’t count because she knows his heart. Yet, it is beyond irresponsible to impute attitudes and feelings to another person that are not supported by evidence beyond one’s own feelings. It is slander.
To slander another is to take from them their right to their reputation. Chavez called DeMuth a racist after merely scanning his essay in the CRB. It’s bad enough that she did not read carefully (the first page of his essay makes clear he is not speaking of “blood and soil” nationalism). But her performance on CNN sounds a bit too pat, a bit too rehearsed, so much so that it’s like listening to a mantra. Chavez has an opinion that is like a hammer. The facts will conform to it, or get pounded in her mind until they do. Chavez should be ashamed.
Public slanders deserve public apologies in the same manner, and in the same forum where they were uttered.
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