THE UNCOMFORTABLE WHOLE
by Josh Kruger | Email: jkruger@philadelphiaweekly.com | Twitter: @jawshkruger
Extremists vs. America
It’s about time certain communities denounced their vicious radicals once and for all.
20 PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY | january 14 - 21 , 2015 | Philadelphiaweekly.com
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et’s not mince words: The fate of Western civilization as we know it hangs in the balance. Over the past 6,000 years of recorded human history, no other system of government has afforded human beings the kinds of freedom and opportunity that are found in Western democracy: freedoms of speech, press and religion. There are those who wish to destroy this system. We Americans know this all too well. Are we as a society going to stand up and assert our rights? Or are we going to succumb to a theocratic terror campaign hellbent on destroying our freedoms? Isn’t it about time we demand that the leaders of a certain community denounce, in the strongest possible language, the thuggish, oppressive and sometimes violent behavior of their most radically anti-liberty, anti-American extremists? For several hundred years now, a rabidly violent band of thugs has grasped Lady Liberty by the throat, trying in vain to extinguish her gasps. They’ve murdered cops, bombed an American city, torched NAACP offices, terrorized African-Americans—they’ve even opened fire upon federal officials. Looking at the broad sweep of American history, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that white conservativist extremists are a threat to our nation’s founding principles and, indeed, its continued existence. And if our supposedly more moderate white conservative neighbors expect us to believe that they don’t quietly endorse this ongoing attack on America, it’s about time they started publicly repudiating the creeping oppression of conservativist radicalism. They can start with one of the most recent violent attacks, right here in eastern Pennsylvania. Just last fall, authorities undertook a multi-state manhunt for East Stroudsburg-area resident Eric Frein. Prosecutors say Frein, a white man with extreme anti-authority tendencies, acted out his revolutionary fantasies by taking the life of one Pennsylvania state trooper and maiming another, lying in cowardly wait to murder them outside their barracks with a sniper’s rifle. Now in state custody, Frein awaits the very legal process and protections he attacked with his terroristic rampage. Four months later, I still have not heard members of the Tea Party movement, representatives of the libertarian Cato Institute or any other group of devotedly conservative white people denounce Frein. I haven’t seen any state or local militias or military-reenactment groups issue formal statements disavowing Frein’s murderous attack, and I haven’t seen CNN’s Don Lemon ask white people why some of them are terrorists. Why not? Why don’t white conservatives want to talk about the violence being perpetrated against American law and order by the most vicious of their people? Why is the media bending over backward, kowtowing to political correctness run amok, trying not to hurt white people’s feelings? It’s not as if Frein is the only white anti-government extremist who’s brutally attacked people whose jobs represent the sovereign authority of the United States of Amer-
ica. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995; he was obsessively enraged that a democratically elected government had the temerity to exercise its legal authority. Being one of those all-too-familiar white conservativist radical types, McVeigh wasn’t satisfied with exercising his First Amendment rights of speech or assembly. Instead, he took a bomb and went straight for America’s jugular, slaughtering 168 innocent people—including 19 children. It was only the latest incident, of course, in a long tradition of white radical conservativist violence against our nation. On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, white conservativist Christians operating under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four little girls. Dressed in their Sunday best, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all African-Americans, perished at the hands of those extremists, those terrorists who couldn’t bear the existence of the American way of life, which, includes freedom and equality under law for all people. Our “moderate” white conservative friends expect us to believe that these sorts of acts of violence are isolated incidents. And yet when such things happen—just as when more insidious sorts of threats to the freedoms granted
by the U.S. Constitution are perpetrated by conservativists who’ve infiltrated our government—our friends do not rise en masse to officially condemn them. When the FBI releases data showing that 83 percent of white people murdered are killed by other white people, why does the Heritage Foundation not send its spokespeople to express outrage at this wave of white-perpetrated violence? When Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe cites his Christianity as a motivating factor in his campaign to deny constitutional rights to gay citizens, where are the moderate Christian clerics going on cable television to repudiate his toxic religiosity? In the absence of the white conservative community’s vociferous, constant public denouncements of terrorists like anti-government cop-killers, I am left to believe that perhaps a silent majority of white conservatives hold these same positions. In the absence of Christian clerics distancing themselves from politicians who do not believe in the legitimacy of the rule of law, I’m left to believe that Christianity is a religion incompatible with secular American laws. Does that not seem reasonable? After all, we claim it is when we’re talking about black people and Muslims. n
Columnist Josh Kruger is a sad white Christian man.