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This weekend, my Twitter timeline was packed with anger, dismay and despair over the events in Charlottesville. Millions of Americans may be shocked, but many of us arent surprised by the magnitude of racism and anti-semitism displayed by these events. We've been warning white people about the depravity and violence of white rage, which often goes unchecked and unsanctioned, for decades.

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There is nothing more American than unfiltered white rage and white supremacy. What occurred in Charlottesville this weekend wasnt an anomaly. What occurred on November 8, 2016, was as American as apple pie and what happened this past weekend was, too. This country is built upon the ideologies of white supremacy and we are still grappling with that legacy, as evidenced by tweets Lady Gaga sent on Saturday:

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Lady Gagas message is most likely well-intentioned, but I wish she understood the ignorance of her tweets. The same goes for the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Camila Cabello and Norman Lear, all of whom seem to have forgotten what the origins and history of the U.S. look like.

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But it doesnt surprise me when white Americans display simplistic and superficial ideas of what they think will end public displays of bigotry or inept leadership. White Americans have a tendency to whitewash and deliberately downplay the reality and gravity of their past and present sins. Slavery is regarded as a minor error within the great tapestry of brutality, despite its long-lasting, systemic and ever-present effects. White people are simultaneously fascinated by slavery-era history and deeply scared of admitting how much they still benefit from generational wealth and privilege from as far back as 400 years ago. Slavery allowed land-owning, slave-owning whites to accumulate massive amounts of wealth while racking up major savings on labor costs (some economists estimate the value of slave labor to be as much as $14 trillion). This money was passed down for generations, while the descendants of enslaved people are still suffering from the effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Going further back, white European settlers were given acres of land under the 1862 Homestead Act, after Native Americans were forcibly removed, and thousands died, following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In 1790, free white persons were given naturalization while immigrants like Asian Americans and other non-white groups were denied citizenship and therefore barred from owning land and accumulating wealth. These barriers to citizenship didnt change until 1952. White people in the U.S. benefitted from redlining, the G.I. Bill of Rights and, even today, white women benefit the most from affirmative action laws.

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"There is nothing more American than unfiltered white rage and white supremacy."

By tweeting #ThisIsNotUS, Lady Gaga and other white progressives ignore just how very much this is the United States. This is a country which still holds territories like Guam and Puerto Rico, and routinely destroys the lands belonging to Native Americans for the sake of oil and other resources. This is a nation which forced more than 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps and dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

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The U.S. government uses the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to justify the imprisonment of millions of Americans in horrible conditions in order to use prison labor for profit. It has allowed the practice of forced sterilizations on marginalized populations and still did until 2010. State government officials are continually finding ways to re-draw voting maps in order to sway voters toward the right and disenfranchise people of color. Last year, the United Nations issued a report which condemned systemic and structural racism opposing Black Americans and stated that the U.S. government is not acting with due diligence to protect the rights of African Americans. Their report called for reparations for the centuries of racism and discrimination.

I could go on listing the numerous present and past atrocities perpetrated by this nation. But its important to address what white liberals like Lady Gaga need to understand: people of color have been warning you about the effects of ignoring systemic and overt forms of racism for years.

Racism doesnt always look like the KKK marching hoodless in broad daylight. Racism also looks like white liberals getting angry at people of color who ask them to confront how they benefit from white supremacy and white privilege. It looks like white women telling me that I am being divisive by asking for an honest conversation about race and racism within feminist circles. It looks like tone-policing, emotional labor, objectification, fetishization, the white-savior complex, staying silent when you hear overt racism, saying nothing about working in a mostly white to all-white office, ignoring gentrification and the school-to-prison pipeline, loving The Help but hating Girls Trip.

"It has always been on white people to end systems of oppression that their ancestors either started or were complicit in at one point or another."

White liberal racism and ignorance is colorblind and complexyou dont see color until a Black person beats you at getting the job you wanted. You dont mind putting #ItsNotUs in your tweet, but you refuse to dismantle white supremacy from the top down because youre scared of confronting those you consider to be friends or family. Meanwhile, white supremacists and Nazis harass Black, indigenous and people of color activists online and sieg heil amongst lit tiki torches on a university campus. This has always been you. It has always been on white people to end systems of oppression that their ancestors either started or were complicit in at one point or another.

We need white liberals to confront how white supremacy protects them, how they have a privilege which allows them to see blatant racism and still debate the merits of a dialogue with white supremacists and Nazis who want people of color and Jewish people dead. We need white liberals to confront racism in its many forms with courage and persistence, because racism isnt going to die off with younger generations. The white racists in Charlottesville learned their racism from their parents and their own children will learn it from them. Racism is the legacy of white supremacists and the white people who did nothing to stop it. This is us. This is America.

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White Liberals Still Don't Understand White Supremacy - HarpersBAZAAR.com

Last night, I joined thousands at Trump Tower in New York to protest the atrocities that took place in Charlottesville over the weekend. I learned that us liberals and conservatives arent as different as we think. I just wish that were a good thing.

I was never really an activist until the current presidential administration took office. Since then, Ive tried to be conscious about which protests I attend, which chants I engage in, and ultimately be thoughtful about what messages I stand behind. I recall standing under Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue a few days after the election amidst a sea of people chanting New York hates you! donning shirts and signs that celebrated love over hate most notably Love Trumps Hate.It felt wrong. I didnt chant, but I wasnt concerned.

Overwhelmingly, my experience at gatherings like the Womens March on Washington or the protest of the travel ban in New York have been stamped in my timeline as formatively positive. Ive met wonderful, kind, and passionate people spanning from first-time to seasoned activists. I never understood how these people (myself included) were perceived as deviant by the right.

Off to the side of the main gathering near Trump Tower was a small group of Trump supporters. Lined by police within arms reach of one another, a sidewalk was barricaded so that the Trump supporters faced a group of protesters, likely quadruple in size. I squeezed my way to the front, elbows resting on the metal barricade that separated me from my ideological opposites.

Initially, there were some references to America being in the hands of God and how Trump had won so we needed to get over it. It wasnt anything I hadnt heard before.

The mood changed when a man, clad in Trump 2020 regalia, contorted his face, raised his voice and howled, Do you think you would win against us in a civil war? We would crush you! He proceeded to berate a teenage girl for not explaining to him why she had written justice on her sign and called someone a faggot for chanting Boo! I asked him not to use that word and he assured me, Im gay, its fine. My palms met my face were both gay.

The police, mirroring Moses parting turbulent seas, stood as both sides catapulted vulgar threats and insults while throwing their bodies around in uninhibited motions. While I heard things come from the Trump side like, Youre brainwashed and, You pansies are all losers! I was met with comments such as, At least Im not a product of incest like your uneducated asses from the side I was seemingly supporting. People walking through the divide tore signs out of Trump supporters hands and flipped each other off, all the while screaming at one another without pause. No one had come to listen.

My emotions around living in 2017 are without words. Angry, embarrassed, terrified, ashamed, introspective, come close. However, last night I had an unsettling and undeniable realization: the conservative media has just as much content to make us look bad as we do them.

I am firm in my beliefs: black lives matter, trans people are not a burden, Muslim people are at the backbone of America, nuclear war is not the answer, the list goes on. Im no longer grounded in my confidence that we are giving the right the ammo they need to listen to our point of view.

Consider this: Im liberal, and most of my news comes from sources that align with my beliefs. These sources are pushing for what they believe in and its easier to argue that the other side is wrong when they present a clip of someone at a Trump rally yelling go back to where you came from towards a minority group. The same is true about conservative media. Last nights event taught me that the conservative media has ample resources to arm themselves with scenes of liberals threatening violence and rallying around hate, the very hostility were so passionate about ending.

I will continue to show up to rallies, think critically of the opinions I endorse in the heat of protest, and question how I might be contributing to the constraints our country faces. But now, Im committed to supplying the conservative media not with snippets of the darkest sides of our own fight but with ears that are willing to listen. This includes sitting down with myself and my like-minded neighbors to gut check if were always qualified to disarm hate.

My ask is this: if we find ourselves in the face of someone whose opinions dont match our own, we will remember that were speaking on behalf of a movement. We will think about what wed want the Right to see and what concerns of ours wed want them to hear. If were scared for our safety or that of others, by all means we will act accordingly. But in moments of peaceful protest, we will repeatedly remind ourselves that we could end up on the screens of the other side threatening the very hate we abhor.

And damn, our country is divided.

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Liberals, It's Time To Look At Ourselves In The Mirror - HuffPost

Szilrd Nmeth, a prominent parliamentarian affiliated with Hungarys ruling Fidesz party, knows who is to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia during a rally by neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. In keeping with the politics of the Hungarian regime, Mr. Nmeth points the finger at liberal fascists, who bear full responsibility for the fatal events in this Virginia college town.

He wrote on Facebook:

Liberal fascism leads to this. It is to the detriment of the quiet, peaceful and normal majority when the possessed people of the far left, the ultra-liberal and the far right cooperate or at times battle with each other.

Mr. Nmeth then went on to commend President Donald Trumps initial statements, in which he relativized the overt racial hatred of the of neo-Nazis, who no longer even bothered to hide their identity out of any sense of shame. They spewed racial hatred on the streets of this town and confidently identified with this, not worrying about professional or personal repercussions. Once again, the presidents understanding of the situation is remarkably precise and one can only agree with his position, gushed Mr. Nmeth.

Szilrd Nmeth

Of course, after two days, Mr. Trump was pressured into unequivocally condemning the neo-Nazis. Most in the Republican party would not have found it so difficult to condemn neo-Nazism as the American president and his Hungarian supporters seem to have. In Hungary, condemning Nazism and racism will often turn you into an anti-Hungarian traitor, but not in the U.S., where there are still a handful of elderly veterans who fought in Europe during World War II. For instance, Republican Orrin Hatch from Utah had this to say:

We should call evil by its name. My brother didnt give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home

He then added about the mainly young men who marched in Charlottesville with tiki torches that are more commonly and more innocuously used in the backyards of American households duringsummer barbecues:

Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, & have no place in civil society.

Its unfortunate to note that in contrast to the Republican party, where one will still find dissenting voices on any number of issues (including health care, immigration or an issue such as this), Fidesz is comprised only of yes men who nod and vote as demanded of them by the Prime Ministers office. They are fully servile, always unthinking and at most express any misgivings in private. What should give some solace to those who worry about the state of liberal democracy in the U.S. is that dissenting voices in the party currently in power are still heard and there are still many with a sense of civic courage. And what should concern those who have long spoken out about Hungarys descent into authoritarian rule is that there are still so many in the West who are sufficiently blind and ill informed to see in Hungarys current government a partner in dialogue.

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Charlottesville A Hungarian government politician blames the liberals - Hungarian Free Press

In the ongoing meme war between conservatives and liberals, Twitter has become a frequent battleground. But the dismantling of a Confederate statue by a group of protesters on Monday in Durham, North Carolina, has kicked off a back and forth thats become all too familiar of late: a tweet full of conservative outrage being immediately hijacked by bemused liberals and progressives who then transform it into an expression of sheer absurdity.

In this instance, the catalyst was a tweet by actor James Woods, who saw the toppling of a racist statue as tantamount to the toppling of democracy itself:

Its mix of exaggerated patriotism and hand-wringing, along with the oddly hashtagged #liberals, made Woodss tweet prime joke fodder. And many of the responses quickly entered the realm of absurdity:

Such a response quickly became so routine that some people didnt even bother to paste the whole text of the meme:

The ever-expanding collection of statues thatve been referenced in the meme is truly, delightfully bizarre, with works ranging from the weird to the much weirder to the perverse to the hideous to the provocative to the completely WTF. If nothing else, the meme is a fun reminder of how versatile art can be.

But it also has a lot in common with other recent Twitter memes, like the Future that liberals want meme or the nothing but respect for MY president meme. Both of those earlier memes also originated from a single tweet that went viral more for its exaggerated outrage than for people supportively retweeting its contents.

And both of them, like this new statue meme, generated reactions in a specific format: the copying and pasting of the original text alongside immediately ridiculous and over-the-top images meant to reflect that exaggerated outrage.

There are plenty of Twitter memes that function around recontextualizing quotes for example, the progressive "she persisted" meme. But the theme that characterizes this particular meme trend seems to be the equating of conservative outrage with complete and utter absurdity. The more sober the original tweet is, the more hilariously unlikely its corresponding memeification is likely to be.

The future that liberals want meme might as well have been a template for this structure: You start with sincere outrage with the future that liberals want, it was a dismissive quip about a photo of a drag queen sitting next to a woman in a niqab on the New York subway and end up with dramatically manufactured outrage over, for example, an apple holding a sea trident. Thats exactly what were seeing with the statue meme, where Woodss suggestion that the removal of Confederate statues throughout the US will inevitably lead to the destruction of a famous memorial honoring Marines has spawned absurd celebrations of all the ridiculous statues, monuments, marketing gimmicks, art installations, and temporary structures that maybe need a good dismantling.

Given that the current political climate seems to make joking about sincerely held views the order of the day, dont expect the trend to fade anytime soon.

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Before the #liberals is the latest entry in Twitter's evolving absurdist meme trend - Vox

Washington Times

Liberals faulted for the 'stinging' failure of identity politics Washington Times Arriving Tuesday: The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla, a Columbia University humanities professor and, yes, a liberal Democrat. The 160-page book is a tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American ...

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Liberals faulted for the 'stinging' failure of identity politics - Washington Times