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CNN sunk to a new low this week, labelling all Americans who voted for President Trump “white supremacists by default.”
In a piece entitled "'White Supremacists by Default': How Ordinary People Made Charlottesville Possible," CNN writer and producer John Blake writes that “the tacit acceptance of millions of ordinary, law-abiding Americans” is to blame for the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Va., last week and “such a racially explosive climate” in America today.
Blake writes that “it’s easy” to condemn white supremacists and other hate groups, but the real “tragedy” is the “ordinary people -- the voters who elected a reality TV star with a record of making racially insensitive comments.”
“It's easy to focus on the angry white men in paramilitary gear who looked like they were mobilizing for a race war in the Virginia college town," he says. "But it's the ordinary people -- the voters who elected a reality TV star with a record of making racially insensitive comments, the people who move out of the neighborhood when people of color move in, the family members who ignore a relative's anti-Semitism -- who give these type of men room to operate, [some activists, historians and victims of extremism] say.
“That was the twisted formula that made the Holocaust and Rwanda possible and allowed Jim Crow segregation to survive: Nice people looked the other way while those with an appetite for violence did the dirty work, says Mark Naison, a political activist and history professor at Fordham University in New York City,” the piece goes on.
Blake quotes Naison who says you can’t have forms of hate without bystanders “who push aside evidence of racism, Islamophobia or sexism.”
''You have to have millions of people who are willing to be bystanders, who push aside evidence of racism, Islamophobia or sexism. You can't have one without the other,'' Naison told CNN.
"We are a country with a few million passionate white supremacists -- and tens of millions of white supremacists by default," he added.
The piece then describes four different categories of ordinary people: the “down-low” segregationists who oppose segregation on the outside but segregate themselves by living in all-white neighborhoods; those who say “yes, but…” meaning those who condemn racism but add a qualifier that diminishes the condemnation; those who choose chaos, or those who knew of Trump’s character and persona but chose to vote for him anyway; and, lastly, those who look the other way.
Blake concludes by asking readers to take a hard look at “the ordinary people around you” -- including family, friends, and themselves -- to answer the question of “why those white racists feel so emboldened” now.
Is no one else responsible? Are there "ordinary people" on the left that fuel racial tensions in America? Only Trump voters?
Makes sense, given how the unabashedly biased news network recently described the violent left-wing group Antifa as activists "seeking peace through violence."
The piece calls to mind when 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called all Trump supporters “deplorables.”
CNN is no better for its writers issuing blanket statements.
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