The White Riot

 The white riot that is occurring in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder is on par with the one that occurred after OJ Simpson’s acquittal.

White riots back then were enacted mostly on the establishment news, with the new cable tv networks joining in. But social media at that point was mostly listserv, so it was an oral thing you’d hear in bars and at work. I remember going to a bar with my friend Dave and a friend Dave’s from Brooklyn and watching as the news reports stoke amazing amounts of anger in the room. And in Dave’s friend. I, who at the time was taken up with other matters and read a newspaper once a week, was not expecting this. I thought it was in the order of things that rich people killing their wives were as likely to get off as cops killing black kids. We live in the U.S.A., I thought. But the wound in the white notion of the order of things was very raw.

I’m more plugged in, although of course living in France not that plugged in, and still the white riot after Kirk’s murder surprised me. Intellectually, I had long suspected the “centrist” crowd, from Bari Weiss to Matt Yglesias, all those influencers, pundits, substackers and whatnot, were connected by a secret sympathy with the Trumpites. Secret sharers in the bigotries, the misogyny, the homophobia, and above all the racism. But I was not prepared, emotionally, to see this spelled out in 24/7 surround sound. That is how you know you are in a White Riot.

In the OJ Simpson case, it made some sense. Yes, we all read about rich fucks doing what they want and getting great lawyers and getting off. But this was a black rich fuck, a celebrity, and it reversed the white sense of order – for above all, the White nation’s self-image is that of punishers. From lynching to mass imprisonment, this comes out of the heart. And in that instance, they were rendered, well, nooseless.

In the Kirk case, the environment has changed. Every punk and pokey pony has a pocket phone with 24/7 social media and news on it. And substackers know substackers. Thus, while it isn’t that much of a surprise that Bari Weiss’s Free Press (which is to the establishment media now what Matt Drudge was to establishment media then – a home away from home for the Freudian Es) would publish a headline, Nous sommes tous Charlie, both echoing and shitting on the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, it did surprise me that a mook like Ezra Klein, or a magazine like Atlantic, would take up the line that Kirk was doing politics “the right way.” The right way apparently includes advocating for public televised executions – beheadings for instance. As he said, it would be good for the kids. https://www.reddit.com/.../to_suggest_that_televised.../

I hate White Riots. But there isn’t much I can do about them, and really, the order of things itself is a little bit like a frozen White Riot. So there’s, sadly, that.