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Fanatics, Extremists, and Racists, Oh My! by ACDragon

So now I've left Minds.com. I originally joined Minds.com earlier this year because of all the post-election drama and anti-free-speech bullshit on Twitter. I left it shortly thereafter for reasons that I don't even remember anymore. Then I rejoined about a month or two ago. And now, I've left the site again. Why? Because that site is inundated with morons screaming bloody murder over interracial couples and families, as well as white people making the decision to not have babies, and they're calling it "white genocide." Because they won't stop acting as if people deciding who they love and who they will marry is somehow actually someone else's decision and part of some huge conspiracy to wipe out the mythological "white race."

Some of the things these people say does make sense, such as the fact that having lots of refugees coming into European nations from cultures where violence and rape are the norm will increase the amounts of violence and rape. That's simple numbers, there's no racism necessary to come to that conclusion. But so much of the reasonable stuff is drowned out by all the "white genocide" rhetoric. People posting pictures of Adolf Hitler like he's some kind of hero and treating him almost like he's a god...

I was brought up in and around Portland, Oregon. For those of you who don't know this, the U.S. Pacific Northwest has had a rather large presence of white supremacist groups such as the Aryan Nations for a very long time. In fact, the state of Oregon itself was originally founded on racism. Oregon was the only non-Confederate state in the United States that not only allowed slavery on a temporary basis (Oregon was technically abolitionist, but slave owners who moved there from other states could keep their slaves for up to 7 years upon arrival), but also had an exclusion clause which forbade any non-whites from living there permanently. The exclusion clause remained in effect well into the 1920's, and even up into my childhood in the 70's and 80's, racism in Oregon was comparable to how racism in the Deep South is often portrayed in the media. In 1984, an Ethiopian college professor who was found dead in Portland shortly after his arrival there. One of the local white supremacist groups (I think it was the Aryan Nations) took responsibility for his murder. This kind of stuff was sadly quite common in the Northwest and while it was toned down when I left Oregon in 2011, there was still a lot of overt racism there.

On an interesting side note, when I moved to Arlington, Texas, in October, 2011, I was surprised to find that the racism here is less prominent than it is in Oregon. Now, some people have told me that the area I live in (The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex) is what essentially amounts to an anomaly (or as one person so colorfully put it, an "oasis of sanity"), and given that most of Oregon is conservative and the state only votes liberal because of the cities of Portland and Salem, I find that actually quite believeable.

But in any case, I was raised around racism. My own parents were two of the most vicious racists I've ever met. They could be polite about it if they wanted to, but make no mistake, they judged people based on the color of their skin far more often than they judged them based upon pretty much anything else. In fact, most of my family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and so on, are very racist. The younger members of the family, not so much, and I for one am grateful for that. I've also been a victim of racist violence. A lot of people would say that what happened to me, the terror that I faced as a 10 year old boy at the hands of three black teenagers in a schoolyard because I and a friend who was with me were both white, wasn't racism at all. Well, those people are full of shit. They weren't there, they didn't get shoved prostrate onto the ground, they didn't get whipped, they didn't get forced to eat dirt, and they sure as hell didn't get told that they would be slaves and would never see their loved ones again because of crimes committed by white people who died over a century before they were born, so they don't get to sit in judgment over what happened and they sure as hell don't get to claim that it wasn't racism. It most certainly WAS racism, and it most certainly WAS directed at two white boys simply because they were both white. No amount of "power plus prejudice" bullshit is going to change that. They attacked us solely because of our race, therefore it was racism.

My point in all this is not to gain pity. Rather, my point is that racism has been prominent in my life pretty much my entire life. If there was any single good thing that I could credit to the abusive behavior of my parents towards me, that one single good thing would without a doubt be that I despise racism. While I am a firm believer in free speech, and while I believe that hate speech is free speech, I also am a firm believer in being an adult and deciding to be around speech that I want to hear and avoiding speech that I don't want to hear, and so I've left Minds.com as a result of that. It's sad that Minds has become so inundated with racism and the tired old "white genocide" rhetoric that I've heard since I was a teenager. People claiming that the country is falling apart because gays have the same rights as straights, because trans people are tolerated instead of murdered, and in this case because a black man can marry a white woman and have mixed race kids... this kind of rhetoric sickens me to no end. These people are just as bad, if not worse, than the BLM and ANTIFA folks who try to blame all white people for all the woes of the world and try to claim that because The People elected Donald Trump to be the President of the United States that therefore the land has become corrupt and are screaming "revolution" because they didn't get their way. Extremism of any kind bugs the shit out of me.

By the way, I doubt that Minds would have nearly as huge a concentration of racists had Twitter and other sites not decided that "hate speech" (which in their eyes only includes anti-PoC speech but not anti-white-people speech) wouldn't be tolerated. If they had allowed those kinds of speech and simply been adults and done the work necessary to moderate the site, things wouldn't be nearly as polarized as they are right now.

Anyway, so I've left Minds.com a second time. I wish the site well, though I honestly don't like a lot of the people who use it, and I sure as hell don't like the white supremacist rhetoric. Much like the anti-white rhetoric on Twitter (which thankfully seems to have died down a bit in the last few weeks), I just can't handle all the fearmongering and othering...

And while we're at it, I want to tell you about something else that I've noticed. All of this "white genocide" rhetoric tends to gravitate towards a Fundamentalist Christian style of morality. The claim is that things like gay marriage, interracial marriage, interracial kids, and even teachers not being allowed to force children to pray to the Christian god, which is from a 1963 Supreme Court decision concerning "school prayer" (by the way, the decision ONLY forbids schools from leading children in prayer, there is NO SUCH PROHIBITION against children praying voluntarily on their own - a fact which the Christian Right conveniently omit whenever they talk about it); that all of these things are what are destroying America. It's all consistent with the rhetoric I used to hear when I attended an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church that had a Dominionist bent. The same is true, I've noticed, with anything concerning the "Illuminati" or the "Reptilians." They also seem to always point at Jews whenever they talk about this stuff. It's all race- and morality-based. They are just as opposed to people having the freedom to choose their own lifestyle, beliefs, religious affiliations, sex lives, or whatever else you can think of to insert here, as the people they claim to oppose. One side wants communism while ignoring the bloody history of communism in general, and the other side wants an Old Testament style Christian theocracy while ignoring the fact that almost nothing they believe is in any way consistent with anything Jesus Christ, the man after whom Christianity was named, taught. Either way, it's fanaticism, and you cannot reason with fanatics just like you cannot reason with a person suffering from a delusional disorder. Nothing you say will convince a fanatic that they are wrong, because they have convinced themselves that any evidence that contradicts them is merely proof that they are right.

Since this stuff is so overwhelming I've decided to just get the hell out. Like I said, I wish the site itself well, but I just can't handle all the extremism and fanaticism. It's simply too much.

Fanatics, Extremists, and Racists, Oh My!

ACDragon

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    I have been thinking about leaving FA. Mostly due to the stuff you mentioned above. But I'm also leaving for different reasons.