Michael Tracey Is A Perfect Example Of How Dangerous The Fringe "Left" Is
Tracey's ongoing efforts to downplay the threat of fascism and white nationalism in America is disgusting.
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by Justin Rosario
If you've been reading my articles for a while, you know that while I despise white Republican voters for their intolerance, greed, and stupidity, the loathing I feel for them pales in comparison for the utter disdain I have for libertarians and the fringe "left."
On the one hand, white Republican voters lie about almost everything but they're usually quite open about their bigotry and their desire to turn American into a theocracy run by the rich. Libertarians are a topic for another today but the unbelievable depths of bullshit the fringe "left" pushes while pretending to be more progressive than thou is pathological and Michael Tracey is one their leading lights.
Meet Michael Tracey
If you're not familiar with Tracey, he's part of the cohort of activist journalists that includes Glenn Greenwald, David Sirota, Jimmy Dore, and most recently, Matt Taibbi. They're the guys (and, shocker!, they're almost all guys and, double shocker!, white guys at that) who have spent the last two plus years sabotaging the Trump-Russia investigation ostensibly from the left.
They do this by incessantly attacking Democrats and repeating on an almost hourly basis that anyone who believed the Mueller report was some kind of mentally ill imbecile. When Trump's mob attorney William Barr delivered his summary of bullshit, Tracey and the rest went ballistic, screeching about how they were right all along and hahahaha all the Democrats look like fools now!
Three weeks later, when Barr's lies unraveled and eventually collapsed in their entirety, Tracey and his buddies flew into an absolute rage at anyone who dared point out that they had been utterly wrong. Tracey is also got in Rep. Maxine Waters' face with a "gotcha" question and when she brushed his microphone out of her way and walked off, Tracey ran to twitter to claim the not exactly burly 71-year-old Waters had "shoved" him. He spent the next couple of days being hilariously mocked as a drama queen.
Denying Fascism and White Nationalism in America
This is not what brings us to Michael Tracey today, however. It is Tracey's ongoing efforts to downplay the threat of fascism and white nationalism in America that deserves some attention:
This is possibly the worst false equivalence I have ever seen and I (begrudgingly) read the New York Times and CNN's Chris Cillizza.
The sacrifices I make for my audience....
Muslim extremism is a problem in Middle Eastern countries and, as much as I don't usually agree with the right, it's not something we can ignore. That doesn't mean we should go in guns ablazin' but it's a real thing that can't be dismissed, especially not now that 18 years of Republican adventurism has made it significantly worse.
Muslim extremism, however, is not much of a problem here at home. Aside from 9/11, attacks have been few and far between and we just are not seeing a spread of Islamic radicalism in the United States. Our culture simply does not support its growth.
The Rise of White Nationalism is Real
We are, however, seeing a massive increase in white nationalist extremism. And if I know that, Michael Tracey knows it. It's not like I have secret access to law enforcement databases he does not. Right wing extremism has been on the rise since Obama was elected and Trump turbocharged it. But that's not the narrative Tracey is pushing so we're supposed to pretend the threat is "exaggerated."
Eleven more people were killed in a synagogue in October of last year and another one in a different synagogue just a month ago. But the threat of Nazis is exaggerated, right?
Aside from Tracey's heartless dismissal of all of the other recent victims of white nationalism in order to make his false equivalence, there is, of course, a minor, oh-so-subtle difference between what happened in Charlottesville and Manhattan: The President of the United Fucking States is not encouraging Muslims to commit more acts of terrorism. Trump is openly engaged in stochastic terrorism on a daily basis. His words and his actions are not dog whistles, they're air raid sirens to white nationalists that this is their time.
"Very fine people?" Message received. Pardoning Joe Arpaio? Message received. Putting migrant children into concentration camps? Message received. Getting ready to pardon a rabid white nationalist serial killer who murdered unarmed men, women, and children in Iraq and bragged about it? Message fucking received.
In Trump's America, brown skin is open game and white skin is protected.
But, sure, we're inflating the threat because it flatters our sense of moral grandiosity. Meanwhile, Tracey fancies himself the sole arbiter of who is progressive enough to be part of his revolution. Like most white male "progressives," if you don't agree with him 100%, you're an establishment, sellout neoliberal blablabla. No moral grandiosity there.
And how did Nazis in Ukraine become a problem? Did they just magically appear one day from the ether? Did one person read "Mein Kampf" and, just like that, 10,000 Nazis sprang, fully formed, from his head?
No, the Nazis became a problem in the Ukraine the same way they become a problem anywhere: people like Michael Tracey sat in the safety of their mother's basement and told the rest of us to stop complaining about the Nazis.
Now the protests are turning into escalating violence, and here you are, telling us the fire on the first three floors are nothing to worry about and we're just being hysterical. How many more white nationalist terrorist attacks do we need for you to admit there's a problem? How many dead bodies have to pile up before you stop pretending we're exaggerating?
The right has been telling us, very loudly, that if they cannot overthrow our democracy and make themselves the permanent minority rulers of America, they will turn to domestic terrorism. Five years from now, we'll tally up how many people have drowned in a bathtub and how many have been murdered by "patriot" terrorists. But according to Tracey, these are “relatively minor threats”:
In other words, his concerns are more important than yours because he says so. The mating call of the fringe "left" fauxgressive.
The Mother of Double Standards
Curiously, as Michael Tracey devotes most of his energy to attacking Democrats and downplaying the threat of Trump and his base of violent white nationalist fascists, the military-industrial complex is growing more powerful, the financial industry is being deregulated, the cops are being being held unaccountable, and Big Pharma is allowed to run rampant. All of this is a direct result of electing Trump, which Tracey advocated for by telling people not to vote for Hillary Clinton.
And this brings us to the question of how many people have to die at the hands of American Nazis for Michael Tracey to give a damn. The answer is that he will never, in fact, give a damn. Tens of thousands of people can die in terrorist attacks and Tracey will continue to blame Democrats and neoliberals and centrists and anyone and everyone but Republicans and Nazis because while he claims to be a progressive, Tracey's goal, like so many of the fringe "left," is to destroy the Democratic Party.
The only way to do that is to make sure Republicans win at any cost. It's not like Tracey and Sirota and Greenwald and the rest will pay the price. They won't be losing their reproductive rights. They won't be getting murdered by the cops for being the wrong color. They won't go hungry when food stamps get cut or go bankrupt when their health insurance is revoked.
As always, they won't be the ones sacrificing for their revolution and that's just fine with them. As long as someone else is paying the price, spare no expense!
Siding With Monsters
This is why I despise the fringe "left" (and libertarians) more than anyone else in politics. They don't care about anyone but themselves and their precious cause. They're worse than white Republican voters because of their pretense to progressive moral superiority even as they eagerly throw millions of marginalized people under the bus.
And on top of it all, they're, at their core, nihilists willing to tear down everything except their own comfortable corner of the world. They just don't have the balls to say it. Michael Tracey and those like him are dangerous because they inject poison into left's discourse. They, and people like them, gave us Nixon in 1968, Bush in 2000, and Trump in 2016. At each step, they made things massively worse in every conceivable way while reveling in "punishing" the Democrats. These are not people who have the country's best interest in mind. They are small and petty and bitter and only care about satisfying their egos at the expensive of everything they pretend to care about.
If your words and actions enable fascism and defend white nationalism, it doesn't matter how often you scream you're more progressive than everyone else, you're on the side of monsters.
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