Two Nazis Walk Into A Public Forum
Stop me if you've heard this one before...
The last couple days I’ve published a zillion words trying to spell out all the wrong things about treating diversity, equity and inclusion in higher ed as some kind of nefarious political ideology we mustn’t ask anyone about, lest we “discriminate” against their political or personal beliefs.
To do so would restrict “free speech” or constitute “viewpoint discrimination” according to people like Rep. Stephen Howe, the carrier of Sub HB 2460, the anti-DEI bill that passed the Kansas house with the support of 81 mostly (probably all) Republican votes. The only folks who spoke against it on the floor were Democrats.
But all my painstaking arguments can’t hold a candle to what happened on April 16 at the Lawrence, Kansas, city commission meeting via their Zoom comment period.
Here’s the video, unless and until YouTube takes it down (unsure of their policies about this stuff):
https://www.youtube.com/live/ms5rH7OtT_E?si=lnNlJYBLwoqKM01A&t=2316
The wheels start to fly off at 38:36.
“Chad Bastewell” is almost certainly not a real name1 definitely not a human being but rather a condensate of every Fox News (and what watching it leads to) anti-semitic dogwhistle ever uttered. He tells the council…
Good evening council, can you hear me? Excellent. Yeah, I was thinking about the group pushing hate speech laws, and you know, if I was part of the group responsible for pornography, usury, communism, the Holodomor, the slave trade, hijacking mass media, the open border situation, regime change wars, pushing sexual degeneracy, pushing race mixing, 24/7 anti-white narratives, I'd want hate speech laws, too. And so what I'm--I'm requesting that this council consider a resolution to ban so-called hate speech--any laws regards to that, and then the DEI initiatives, the diversity which means fewer white people, inclusion which means exclusion of white people, equity which means stealing from white people.2 I urge this council to forbid, ban any of these so-called racist initiatives and for more information you can watch a movie called Defiant by Devon Stack, and for more information you can go to GTVflyers.com. Thank you for your time.
“Chad” is followed by the very good-faith Sherilyn Wells, who tries to counter some of “Chad’s” bullshit, but “Chad” has already achieved his purpose3 and right at 40:57 the bed gets shat.
“Chad” gets joined by “Jebediah Schlomo” who together give us the following, and I’m not censoring a goddamn thing because y’all are grown-ups and you don’t get to shelter yourselves from what’s in the world:
You are a stupid, self-hating white.
You are a stupid fucking cunt. Shut your fucking mouth you stupid fucking--fuck you, Shut your mouth you [garbled] for Jews
The Holocaust never happened but it really fucking should have. Listen to that. The Holocaust never happened but it should have.
Self-hating whites are the worst!
Hail Hitler, white fucking power, we're sending the niggers back to Africa
What a dumb cunt! What a stupid fucking cunt!
While all this is going on, the feed starts showing the following Nazi imagery (Xs to prevent re-use by bad actors):
The city council reasserts some very white and freaked-out-but-trying-to-maintain version of control at this point, then they go to a recess.
What the “Goyim” trolls pulled off here in four minutes is what I blew days of work on: trying to show folks what the “ideology” supposedly behind DEI is to the conservatives who fear it. This is why Rep. Steven Howe won’t come out and say, specifically, what’s wrong with DEI when the dictionaries and the university descriptions all indicate it’s entirely positive. Because they believe it’s really about forcing people like them to bow to the gods of Jewish white-replacement sexual degeneracy.
Steve-O’s probably most freaked out about having to respect someone’s pronouns and thinks doing so contravenes Natural Law or something, but it’s all wrapped up in the same paranoia.
And what happened in Lawrence illustrates the larger point:
When you let brazen Nazis into a public space, you lose the ability to have a public space and the public space gets shut down. 4
That’s kinda the point.
If you don’t recognize “Chad Bastewell” as a handle, or Goyim Defense League, or how each one of “Chad’s” claims are antisemitic, you need to learn more about the worst people in the fever swamps of the far right. This is where the more acceptable versions of the bigotries “mainstream” conservatism leads you.
It’s boilerplate garbage from “goyim” flyering.
“Chad” is an antisemitic troll. Trolls, well, troll. The best book on trolling is Amanda Marcotte’s Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. The best quote about antisemites and the futility of correcting them is from Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
I can’t give original credit for this story, but I can trace it at least as far as Michael B Tager:
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.”
and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And i was like, “oh damn.”
and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.