Liberal blogger detects “miasmic hatred” of the Other at Tea Party rallies
LA writes to Tim W.:
I just posted your entry on the different treatment the media give tea partiers as compared with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
I was going to add as an example of the crazy things said about the tea partiers by liberals, this remark by blogger Adam Baum:
I have been to Tea Party rallies. And I have been to Occupy Wall Street. I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that the media is representing both of these movements inaccurately. You can almost taste it at these Tea Party events … The “it” is the hatred. It hangs in the air like a miasma of hatred sticking to anyone “different.” And it is exacerbated by preprinted signs and flyers by FreedomWorks and Charles Koch.
So, having attended several Tea Party events, he does not offer anything he actually saw or heard there as evidence of racism. But he states assuredly that he could almost taste the racism, that miasmic yet unexpressed hatred of anyone who is different.
Another problem: since the people at these Tea Party events are presumably virtually all tea partiers, where are the “different” people against whom the tea partiers would be—not audibly or visibly, but miasmically—manifesting their hatred? The truth is that Baum is himself a typical liberal hater, who sees white non-liberal Middle Americans as bizarre subhumans and loathes them. He then projects his hatred onto them, and imagines that they are the haters.
However, in the same entry at Baum’s site there’s also a video featuring things said by people supposedly at tea party rallies. One man on the video proudly boasts, “I’m a racist.” You might expect to see people at a white nationalist gathering speak this way. I find it impossible to believe that tea partiers said these things at a tea party rally. What is your reaction?
Tim W. replies:
Anytime there’s a rally attracting thousands of people, there’s a possibility of riff-raff with their own private agenda showing up. It’s definitely possible that people such as the ones shown in the video have been at Tea Party rallies. It’s also possible they are leftist plants. Recall Tyler Collins, the leftist blogger who attended a Rand Paul Tea Party rally posing as a racist.
The main thing to remember is that the media zero in on any sign, however feeble, of “racism” on the part of conservatives or Republicans. Witness the hysteria over the N-word on an ancient rock at a camp leased by Rick Perry for hunting excursions. This is the same Rick Perry who supports in-state tuition for illegal aliens. Or witness Glenn Beck, whose big rally was a black love fest yet he still gets accused of “racism.”
The media spent a ridiculous amount of time investigating the allegation that Tea Partiers called Black Caucus members the N-word. They came up empty handed. If the people on display in Baum’s video were legitimate Tea Partiers, surely the networks would have exposed it by now. Since they haven’t, I must assume that in all likelihood they are either oddballs who showed up at a Tea Party rally but are not true Tea Partiers or are fakes.
LA replies:
Your last point is telling. If this video were legitimate, it would have been all over the networks.
- end of initial entry -
Mark Jaws writes:
Honestly, Don Lorenzo. What would you expect from a liberal, anti-white Jew such as Adam Baum? These characters need to be smacked in the face with their own hypocrisy—they allegedly crave diversity but where did they go to school, where do they live, and where they do send their kids to school? I’d bet a month’s salary that there is not one prominent liberal media, entertainment or political Jew who sends his kids to a school in which non-white constitute a majority. Not one. And I bring up Jews because they more than anyone else bring up charges of racism against the Tea Party.
LA replies:
You may be right, but has that been statistically shown?
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
I have long held the judgment, informed by my reading of Oswald Spengler, Eric Voegelin, and René Girard, that liberal modernity is a relapse into primitive cultural forms, especially those forms associated with pre-Scriptural religion. The term “miasmic” is significant in this context. A Greek word, it means “pollution,” in the sense of a profaning contamination of a sacred precinct. In Sophocles, the crime of Oedipus is a miasma, as is the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in the tragedy about Electra by Euripides. The leftwing blogger’s description of “Tea Party” attitudes as “miasmic” (proper Greek form: miasmatic) is therefore telling. I hardly suppose that the user of the term could gloss it, but even so, his diction-choice reveals underlying structures of thought that correspond to cultic and sacrificial religiosity, to anxiety about magical contamination and communicable nonconformist dispositions. As Girard teaches us, the assignment of “pollution” or “profanation” to a party prepares the way for the expulsion of that party. That he has introduced a miasma into the community is a standard “scapegoating” accusation, according to Girard.
We can “map” Girard onto Voegelin by noting that Gnosticism (Voegelin describes liberalism as Gnostic) is fanatically concerned with purity, with a sacrosanct “inner circle” in contrast with a polluted and polluting “outer community.” Indeed, the Gnostics regarded the whole of nature as a profanation of some prior, metaphysical perfection, for which their usual name is the Pleroma.
When the liberal establishment excoriates and destroys someone who utters in public terms and observations banned by the unwritten statutes of verbal correctness, this is classic “scapegoating” activity, such as Girard describes in depth in Violence and the Sacred.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 15, 2011 03:30 PM | Send