Pearce Tefft recently wrote an open letter to his son. The other day, PZ posted about the fanatical racist relative he had. I grew up with a rabid John Bircher and bigot extraordinaire. While I was not completely silent in the face of that bigotry, I certainly did not speak up as often or as loudly as I should have done. It’s past time we stop playing all these little games with ourselves, pretending that these bigots aren’t really terrible people, because they are so and so’s Auntie Martha, or Uncle John, and so forth. It’s past time to stop pretending that all the nazis aren’t a problem. They are, and they have now descended into open murder. Conservative Christians are raging in their defense of nazism, and frantically attempting to pin blame everywhere except where it belongs. It’s past time for us all to gather our courage, and speak out. And to keep on speaking out. The more of this we do, the more will join in, finding support. Siobhan has an excellent reason to start yelling at the top of your voice.
My name is Pearce Tefft, and I am writing to all, with regards to my youngest son, Peter Tefft, an avowed white nationalist who has been featured in a number of local news stories over the last several months.
On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.
I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.
I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.
Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.
You can read the rest of Mr. Tefft’s letter here.
I’m shaking with fucking rage right now at that right wing watch article. Everything that the alt right and white nationalists have fucking done in the past few years has made it abundantly clear that they’re far right extremists.
You can read the sort of arguments they make about immigrants, Muslims, women, LGBT people, black people, and progressive policies in general, and then you can read the exact same fucking arguments coming from these same shit spewing “I’m not a racist” conservative shitheels. You can find alt right figures who are simultaneously adored by white nationalists and defended endlessly by establishment conservatives. White nationalists attack progressive ideals in exactly the same way that supposedly non-racist conservatives do, railing against “political correctness” and “multiculturalism”, and supposed destruction of western values. And yet conservative pundits assert that Nazis and the alt right are liberals.
Alt right racists are loud and proud conservatives. They’re also murderous extremists. It’s only possible to think otherwise if you’re willfully ignorant to the point of denying directly observed reality. The only defense that the likes of Wayne Allen Root and Alex Jones could muster was to assert with absolutely zero evidence that the violent Nazis were undercover liberals trying to make conservatives look bad. Their brain dead reasoning basically consisted of saying that, in their own estimation, conservatives are nonviolent. Therefore, the violent alt right protestors must not be conservatives. They never consider that their personal estimation of conservatives is wrong. That’s what conspiracy theories do, they let conspiracy theorists brush off anything that doesn’t fit their worldview as a hoax or a false flag.
We don’t just need to call out Nazis, we need to call out traditional conservatives on how they’re in complete denial of readily observable facts about their relationships to Nazis. We need to call out Dinesh D’Souza, Bryan Fischer, Jesse Lee Peterson, or any other establishment republican shitwipe when they try to pin the actions of the alt right on progressives, or try to claim both sides are equally bad. We need to hammer it in that supposedly non-fascist republicans believe almost all of the exact same bullshit that open white nationalists do. We need to point out every instance of establishment republicans defending or collaborating with figures in the alt right. The cultural toxins that produced the alt right will never fucking dissipate unless we call out their enablers in mainstream conservatism.
This can’t just be something people bring up in comment sections and fora. It has to be a full-on project. It has to become a major part of the message of progressive movements like Indivisible and Black Lives Matter. It has to be something that’s brought up in political races. It has to be the subject of multiple articles and stories on progressive news sites. It has to be brought up during discussions and interviews on tv news shows. It deserves to be covered in episodes of political satire shows like Last Week Tonight and The Late Show. Far right extremist movements will just keep popping up over time as long as mainstream conservatism can maintain its delusion that it isn’t what produced them.