Earlier this week, we learned that we may have been about to witness one of the most outrageous moments in the aftermath of last weekend’s carnage in Charlottesville, Virginia. A cabal of neo-Nazi bottom-feeders were planning to crash the funeral of Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered by a white supremacist who plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. In all likelihood, this obscenity piled on top of injury and insult would have never come to light if not for the relentless digging of right-wing blogger Laura Loomer.
Unfortunately, Loomer doesn’t completely get it. She claimed that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville were actually leftists. After all, they were “national socialists”–and to hear Loomer talk, that’s a “left-wing ideology” by definition. Apparently Loomer isn’t the only one peddling this alternative fact. Two of the religious right’s most influential leaders are of the same mind.
Less than 24 hours after the smoke cleared in Charlottesville, Lance Wallnau took to Facebook to declare that the nation had witnessed “more left on left violence.” He claimed that antifa activists used the “Unite the Right” rally to “CREATE a violent media worthy confrontation” in order to “justify all the money they are paid” by George Soros.
Apparently Wallnau forgets that Heyer was not killed by antifa, but by a white supremacists. He also forgets that those same racists tap-danced on Heyer’s grave, and planned to crash her funeral. But considering that this is the same man who believes that the women who have stepped forward to claim they were sexually harassed at Fox News are being played by the devil, this is to be expected.
Then again, it probably wouldn’t have mattered even if Wallnau had bothered to acknowledge Heyer’s death. After all, he claims that the antifa and the white supremacists are two sides of the same left-wing coin.
“All forms of fascination with Nazi glory is in fact, a historically left wing (not right wing) flirtation fest. Inside every raging liberal is a frustrated totalitarian. Remember that. This is what communism (and its step sister socialism) will produce. Stalin and Mau were communist totalitarian rulers. Hitler? A National Socialist. SOCIALIST. (Like what they teach your kids at college.)”
So a guy who believes that Christians must take over the seven “mountains,” or forces that influence our culture, and put down all who dare to stand in their way, is railing against totalitarians? Sounds like Wallnau can’t stand his own shadow.
Wallnau goes on to say that it isn’t fair to link Nazis and their hateful agenda with conservatives. After all, as he forcefully points out, while conservatives want “LESS government,” progressives want “MORE government control,” “MORE censorship of free speech and MORE punishment of free thought.”
Apparently this canard comes from the official name of the Nazi Party–the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But Newsweek’s Greg Rose points out, Hitler always stressed the “national” in the party name rather than the “socialist” part. Their vision had no room for anyone who wasn’t an “Aryan.” Additionally, as any history student knows, once Hitler was in power, he fell all over himself to rein in the more radical elements of his party, letting it be known that he opposed a “second revolution” to redistribute wealth. He even went as far as to purge most of them in the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Not exactly the act of a chest-beating commie.
American Family Radio afternoon host Bryan Fischer took a similar line on the Tuesday edition of his show, “Focal Point.” People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
About 20 minutes into Tuesday’s show, Fischer claimed that the narrative that the media has pushed–antifa, BLM, and others on the left and white nationalists on the right–was “a false premise.” He claimed that Charlottesville wasn’t a clash between left and right, but “between the left and the left.” He pointed out that white nationalism was actually born out of the left, and that the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow were actually pushed by Democrats.
What Fischer doesn’t want you to know is that when the Democrats finally got their heads out of their butts and embraced civil rights, the party’s segregationist supporters slowly abandoned the party. He also doesn’t tell you that the Republicans completely sacrificed their origins as the party of Abraham Lincoln and welcomed the likes of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into their party rather than tell them to pound sand.
Later in the show, Fischer recalled a discussion he’d had earlier in the day with his producer, Jeff Reed. During the pre-show production meeting, Reed suggested that what happened in Charlottesville is more akin to the historic tension between Sunni and Shia Muslims. He believes that radical elements of both wings of Islam are fighting to implement “their own version of sharia.” Similarly, the white nationalists are supposedly fighting with the antifa and BLM to decide “which version of socialism is going to be the prominent one.”
Um, Bryan? If the neo-Nazis are socialists, then why were they yelling that nonwhites and Jews would not “replace” them? Fascism excludes by definition. Plus, to suggest that the two groups were the same sides of the same socialist coin assumes that both were predisposed to violence and intimidation. As John Podhoertz noted, while the counter-protesters were wrong to respond to violence with violence, “they were not the causes of the agitation.”
It was going to be very interesting, to say the least, to see how the religious right would respond to the Charlottesville horror. We expected them to continue carrying water for Trump, as they have for some time. But if this attempt at revisionist history is the best they can do, it just shows how shallow they are.
(featured image courtesy Ryan M. Kelly, The [Charlottesville] Daily Progress)
