Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Swastikas and a Confederate flags are displayed during anti-vaccine protests by truck drivers in Canada’s capital.
A Tucker Carlson “special report” loaded with antisemitic tropes airs on Fox News — on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Going further, Fox praises antisemite Russian President Vladimir Putin as it sides with Russia against a democracy in Ukraine.
At least 14 historically Black colleges and universities (HCBUs) spread across seven states and the District of Columbia receive bomb threats on the first two days of Black History Month.
The resurgent monster of racism and antisemitism is on the loose, as the world is seeing on a jarringly frequent and widespread basis.
This rising tide of hatred requires a response by all moral people, but it especially demands action from American conservatives. Members of the Republican Party must step up condemnation of this bigotry and cleanse their party of the white nationalists who make up an increasingly visible and vocal part of it.
The party’s shift to the extreme right has emboldened these dark forces, which have become an increasingly visible segment of the GOP in recent years. That includes in Nevada, where the state party leadership has stained the party by allowing groups like the violent white-nationalist Proud Boys to gain a presence.
Our society can’t sit back and allow this to happen. Although news of atrocious acts of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry is coming at a faster and faster pace, we must not treat it as just some unfortunate but routine part of life, like severe weather or chronic illness.
The program from Carlson and Fox News offers an example of what happens when racism is allowed to take root and is presented as normal. Titled “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization,” the documentary (in name only) portrays Jewish philanthropist George Soros as the mastermind of a global conspiracy to destroy democracy in Hungary and across the planet.
It’s a modern, televised repackaging of the age-old deceit that Jews control the world’s financial structure and use it for their own gain. Now, as then, the goal of this message is to stir hatred against Jews by falsely portraying them as symbols of extreme greed and uncaring toward others. It is from these kinds of seeds that the Holocaust grew.
Carlson, voicing a narrative over foreboding music and black-and-white video, accused Soros of spending decades waging “a kind of war, political, social and demographic war on the West.”
“Unlike the threats from the Soviets and the Ottoman empire, the threat posed by George Soros and his nonprofit organizations is much more subtle and hard to detect,” Carlson says. He also claims Soros schemed to “oust democratically elected leaders” and “install ideologically aligned puppets.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said it well in responding to the program on Twitter: “It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media. There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”
Indeed. That’s why it’s necessary to counter racism and bigotry whenever and wherever they crop up, whether in public conversation, online in social media and chat rooms, or in mass media like Fox News. The lies, conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric must be confronted forcefully — the marking of Holocaust Remembrance Day in late January brought us an annual reminder of the horrors that can occur when a society opens the door to systemic racism.
This is where American Republicans come in. They hold the strongest power to force alt-right groups back into the shadows where they belong — something they can easily do by driving neo-Nazis out of their party and condemning their actions.
There’s no gray area here, conservatives, because the alt-right has no place in any civilized society. Members of the GOP can’t take a hold-your-nose approach to white nationalists based on a belief that these groups are an unpleasant but politically beneficial ally.
As Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said of the hate symbols displayed during the trucker protests, “I understand that there are some people who are sympathetic to the protests for other reasons, but we cannot look the other way.”
This is an up-or-down issue. Either Republicans cleanse the growing stain of racial hatred in the party, or they will forever be known as neo-Nazi sympathizers.
