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    Did a French Far-Right Thinker Predict 2020?

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    The year 2020 has thrown the world into disarray, with a severe pandemic creating many unforeseen challenges. The COVID-19 plague has so far infected nearly 30 million people worldwide, with the death toll climbing toward a million. With rising unemployment and sector-specific industry liquidations, economic forecasts predict a grim picture ahead, even for the affluent West. As Francis Fukuyama explains in his recent article in Foreign Affairs, major crises have major consequences.”

    It’s in this extraordinary time that the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police triggered an explosive civil rights movement. Petty criminal elements undoubtedly wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to carry out looting and to damage property. Meanwhile, the Topple the Racists movement — campaigning to remove past icons of slavery — defaced and attacked landmarks, pulling down statues of the likes of George Washington. It is against this backdrop that we can observe how social unrest in a time of a pandemic contributes to feeding the metanarratives of the radical right.

    We Told You So

    French journalist and writer Guillaume Faye contributed to forming narratives of the radical right in his role as a leading thinker of the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE), a think tank established in 1968 by the European New Right (Nouvelle Droit). How does Faye fit into this current troubled world? He fits in because of his affinity for predicting calamities. Faye envisioned a cataclysm that would lead to social collapse, hoping that this would create the space to build his fascist utopia.

    Do Faye’s ideas reflect the current pandemic and economic and social unrest? Not to the vast majority of people, but pseudo-intellectuals of the radical right may well find material to help build their case. Narratives that the radical right have so jealously guarded for decades are finally becoming sellable. It seems that the radical right can now confidently say, We told you so — look, it’s happening.

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    Faye explains his catastrophe as a result of many troubles converging to create a cataclysmic breakdown of the current system. In his scenario, demographic changes brought about by immigration lead to racism and radicalization of ethnic and religious groups. This upheaval increases when liberal democracies are weakened as a result of environmental catastrophes, biological threats such as pandemics and economic meltdowns, producing mass poverty. This is the context that would trigger what Faye called an ethnic civil war between native Europeans and immigrants, who are mainly of Afro-Maghreb origin. This is an idea well-received in far-right circles as a race war.

    To Faye, a race war is a useful catastrophe that would end the current system and pave the way for his utopian empire, for which he even created a blueprint. But Faye’s hope and longing for a useful catastrophe seems far-fetched in reality. The many immigrants who live on the periphery of society in low-paying jobs are unlikely to help the radical right topple the current system by going to war with the natives. The only candidates capable of delivering such a system-uprooting blow are massive natural disasters, which are very rare although not unthinkable, especially given the growing climate emergency.     

    Faye in Context

    Guillaume Faye’s wishful thinking may never become a reality. However, radical-right narratives do not always need reality. Faye’s ideas resonate with historical metanarratives about being conquered and overrun by invaders of different religions and cultures. These deeply ingrained metanarratives can be used to recreate a threat scenario in which immigrants would overrun the native people and attack native culture. The selective memory of such metanarratives can be aggravated by episodes of the current civil rights movement, especially incidents of looting and property damage. Specifically, the Topple the Racists campaign inadvertently bolsters the radical right’s claims that migrants pose a cultural threat.

    All these events are happening in the context of great distress. People are slowly coming out of lockdown while facing mounting death tolls in communities. The situation is already sensitive and unstable. Riots, looting and public disorder can create greater insecurity among people. Looming economic peril is another concern. History teaches us that times of great economic upheaval were always followed by social unrest, aiding the rise of the far right and reviving authoritarianism. The civil rights movement and the Topple the Racists campaign, despite being triumphs of democracy, can create opportunities for the radical right to bolster their narratives. 

    It is not a coincidence, given the impact of the pandemic, that many social scientists are predicting similar social, political and economic upheavals. However, these analyses are based on facts rather than Faye’s wishful thinking and his desire to build the next fascist empire on the ruins of the current world. As the radical right attempts to give weight to their narratives with the help of an ever-chaotic world, geopolitics has also become increasingly hostile to liberal democracies. Authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia are mounting a serious challenge to destabilize the Western liberal system, especially aiming to undermine the postwar rules-based international order.

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    Russia’s attempts to sow racial discord among Americans is well known. China is now eagerly jumping onto the bandwagon by running special coverage of George Floyd’s killing in the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, Global Times. The irony is that this is a regime that has rounded up the Uighur minority into detention camps and has killed prisoners for gruesome organ harvesting. Racial tension in Western liberal democracies not only helps the radical right, but will also embolden authoritarian regimes that seek to discredit democracies.   

    How does the radical right frame their narrative to include recent developments? For example, the alt-right’s Richard Spencer seems to be glad to witness the upheaval of Western civilization. Faye has also been hailed as “The man who predicted 2020.” Twitter feeds have speculated about a liberal conspiracy to start a race war. The pandemic and the civil rights movement seem to give the radical right hope in two different ways. First, at a micro level, the radical right can now give credibility to their narratives about threats to Western culture and heritage. Second, at a macro level, the radical right hopes that the instability in liberal democracies is pushing them toward a system collapse that would uproot neoliberalism, without which the radical right could not ultimately win.

    The collapse of liberal democracy is the ultimate dream of Guillaume Faye and many of his current followers. It is indeed hopeful times for the radical right and the authoritarian regimes around the world. It is unlikely that the current system will face an existential crisis any time soon. However, similar to the 1930s, the context is ripe for greater instability and economic peril that would naturally lead to protectionism and a far-right, as well as an authoritarian, renaissance.  

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.] More

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      America’s Parallel Realities: Are We All in the Wrong Movie?

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      In the early 1960s, one of the most popular series on American television was “The Twilight Zone.” This was a time when television, even in the United States, was still in black and white. Most of the show’s episodes were riveting, poignant and, in a number of cases, scary as hell — starting with the haunting tune at the beginning of each episode.

      “The Twilight Zone” reflected the anxieties and fears of a generation faced with the horrifying potential of technology capable of obliterating humanity. At the same time, it was informed by the equally terrifying capability of humans, if given the chance, to commit the most horrendous atrocities against other humans as long as there was a political regime that both sanctioned and encouraged them in the name of some kind of narrative, based on religion, race, class or superior insight.

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      It might not come as a surprise that in recent years, there has been an upsurge in references to “The Twilight Zone.” As the author of a 2018 article put it, the “anti-fascist, anti-racist themes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ are more relevant today than ever.” So are the themes referring to environmental catastrophes which also featured prominently in the series.

      For me, however, the reason “The Twilight Zone” has increasingly popped up in my mind lies elsewhere, in the way many of the episodes were constructed. A person wakes up in the morning in his or her familiar setting. A few hours later, he or she enters a fundamentally different reality, finds him or herself “in the wrong movie.” This is how I feel when I read American newspapers today and expose myself to the latest news. What is most striking in today’s America is the fundamental disjointedness, for lack of a better word, between realities.

      Episode 1: The Case of the Racist USC Professor

      A couple of days ago, the idyllic world of American academia was rudely awoken by an egregious case of blatant racism in the classroom or, rather, in the virtual space of Zoom-enhanced higher learning. A widely-known and celebrated business communications professor at the University of Southern California, which is generally better known for its prowess in college football than its academic achievements, repeatedly used the N-word — or at least what appeared to be the N-word — during a lecture.

      Commenting on the importance of filler words in communications, he used as an example the expression “nei ge.” The use of the expression caused much distress among African American students, resulting in the demand that the professor be immediately sanctioned. The university complied, putting him on administrative leave.

      As it happens, my wife is Chinese. When she speaks to her relatives and friends, every other sentence is interrupted by “nei ge.” It appears to be one of the most common expressions in Chinese, much like an English “um” or “uh,” allowing the speaker to take a pause to find the appropriate words to finish the sentence. In today’s victim culture, however, an innocent expression is turned into a signifier of racism, given the phonetic similarity between it and the N-word, much to the bewilderment of those like my wife who come from the culture that has used the expression for centuries (apparently a similar expression exists in Korean).

      In the end, there is no easy way to resolve the issue. It would be easy to demand that Chinese speakers in the United States show a modicum of sensitivity when using words that might cause offense. At the same time, however, Chinese speakers have a just cause to demand that others show a modicum of sensitivity to them, give them the benefit of the doubt and abstain from assuming evil intentions.

      The controversy reminds of the brouhaha over the word “niggardly,” which is the synonym of “stingy,” and has nothing to do with the N-word. Yet on several occasions, it has provoked accusations of racism, grounded more in the accuser’s unfamiliarity with the intricacies of the English language than the evil intentions of the person who dared to use it. To be sure, there are good reasons to avoid using the word. It is largely outdated, and “stingy” is a perfectly appropriate equivalent. At the same time, it is preposterous to sanction a person for the single reason that he or she uses a word that might evoke phonetic associations but which has absolutely nothing to do with the offensive term.

      Episode 2: The Case of the Racist Romance Novelist

      Romance novels are big sellers. In fact, they outsell most other literary genres. Its readers number in the millions, not only in the United States but worldwide. Most of the authors are women — as are the readers — and most of the women authors happen to be white. As a result, most of the stories revolve around white women getting involved with white men of either the affluent or the dangerous variety. Romance novels are replete with millionaires and billionaires just waiting to fall in love with single moms and members of motorcycle gangs with a soft core falling for the “sassy girl” next door.

      There are relatively few women of color who have made it in and into the genre. One of them is Alexandria House. Her novels center around some of the strongest women the genre has produced. In fact, Alexandria House’s stories are every feminist’s dream, and for good reason. Her heroines refuse to take shit from anyone, and particularly from good-looking, cocky African American men. Her heroines are strong, ballsy women who know what they want, and they have no problem asking for it and pursuing their goals with determination and verve.

      And then there is this: One of House’s best novels is “Let Me Love You,” with a Goodreads score of 4.6 out of 5. The setting is the hip-hop scene, and the main protagonists are top performers making millions with their songs. The novel has all the drama and heartache one would expect from an outstanding romance, and it delivers in a big way. This, however, is not the point. What is particularly striking to a reader sensitized to the intricacies of racist language is the fact that the novel’s author has absolutely no qualms using the N-word throughout the story. In fact, thanks to Kindle, the precise number of the N-words is easy to ascertain — 39 times, to be exact.

      To be sure, things are never as clear-cut as today’s hypersensitized purists would like us to believe. The debate about the N-word, in its two versions, has been going on for decades, and it has hardly been conducted in as straightforward a fashion as one might expect. To be sure, it does make a difference who uses the N-word. In fact, as has been pointed out, used on the part of an African American author, the word has a different connotation — including expressing a sense of endearment, which, I presume, is House’s intention — than used by a white author. 

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      In a recent essay in The Atlantic, John McWhorter from Columbia University has discussed the question at great depth. One of his conclusions: “Even when discussing rather than wielding the word, people —including black ones — might avoid barking out the word any more than necessary. (Or avoid writing it more than necessary, as in this very essay.) Surely, its history means that it provokes negative associations; it doesn’t sound good.”

      McWhorter starts his essay with controversy at Columbia following a white professor’s evoking the N-word in reference to James Baldwin’s 1963 public statement that he was “not a nigger.” One of her (white) students objected to her uttering the word, the administration agreed and put her under investigation. Ultimately, she was cleared of suspicion that she had violated the university’s anti-discrimination rules.

      For McWhorter, the very fact that a professor would be sanctioned for exploring the question of why James Baldwin would have chosen to say what he did is a clear indication of what he calls mission creep, “under which whites are not only not supposed to level the word as a slur, but are also not supposed to even refer to it. That idea has been entrenched for long enough now that it is coming to feel normal, but then normal is not always normal. It borders … on taboo.”

      This brings me back to the main topic of Episode 1. Here is a case that goes even further than the “mission creep” McWhorter alludes to. It surely is a case of that “hypersensitive to injury so abstract,” so inane, it should never have become an issue of controversy. To make the point quite clear: This is not about the use of Alexandra House’s use of the word. It is about the controversy generated by the use of “nei ga.” As said before, Alexandria House is one of the very best authors of romance novels. Her rather frequent evocation of the word is largely owed, I presume, to her attempt to reflect the realities of the setting of the novel, the hip-hop scene. 

      At the same time, however, in light of the controversy over the use of “nei ga,” it opens up legitimate questions that are not easy to resolve. In any case, it is probably a blessing that most college students don’t read romance novels. They might find themselves in the wrong movie.

      Episode 3: The Case of the Conspiracy Theory to End All Conspiracy Theories

      On August 31, during a mass protest against the German government’s draconian measures (i.e. wearing a mask) to combat the spread of COVID-19, dozens of Germany’s new freedom fighters managed to break through police lines to storm the Reichstagsbebäude in Berlin, the seat of the German parliament. For many of the demonstrators, having to wear a mask, according to one sign, was “inhuman,” almost a crime against humanity.

      As it turns out, many of the freedom stormtroopers were inspired by QAnon, which has taken the white global biosphere, from the US to Germany, from Australia to France, by storm. QAnon is the new all-encompassing master narrative for all those eager minds who want to know, but for whom Marxism is far too sophisticated, Nostradamus too obscure, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion too parochial (a Jewish cabal? So 19th century!), and Scientology far too expensive. To be a QAnonista, all you need is a sign with a big “Q” and you too can sow terror and fear among the elite.

      From what I understand, QAnon is a “theory,” albeit a conspiratorial one, postulating that whatever happens today is the result of the evil designs of obscure forces, from the World Economic Forum to powerful individuals such as George Soros, Bill Gates and, why not, Elon Musk. As Mike Wendling describes it for the BBC, “At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.”

      In the world some of us inhabit, theory is a bunch of ideas that only gain value if subjected to an empirical test. A famous example is the Ptolemaic system, which postulated that the Earth was the center of the universe. It sounded good at the time but turned out to be completely false. The theory was debunked to be replaced by a new theory that made sense. Today, apparently, the word “theory” has a different connotation — at least among the growing number of those who believe there are dark forces at work seeking to manipulate and, ultimately, control humanity. Today we know because we know, because it makes common sense or because we’ve read it somewhere.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This is why creationism — the notion that the Earth was created some 10,000 years ago — is a viable theory, on a par with Darwin’s theory of evolution. (Creationism is absolutely true. I saw pictures of Jesus riding and petting dinosaurs. Or the theory that the world is flat, and if you are not careful, you’ll fall off the edges. Absolutely true, too. I read it in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the ultimate source of scientific knowledge for sophisticated endeavoring teenage minds.)

      In today’s populist world, where science is scorned (it’s just so last century) and scientists loathed, something is true if enough people believe it is true. QAnon is the perfect example. According to a recent poll — unfortunately based on scientific method and therefore prone to fake news-ism — one in three Republicans believes that the “theory” is mostly true. A further quarter thinks that some parts of it are true. That leaves only a bit more than a tenth who think that it is not true at all. Against that, among Democrats, a three-quarter majority hold it not true at all — the definitive proof of the pernicious influence of living in the real world.

      The “success” of QAnon “theory” is symptomatic of the utter bizarreness of the schizophrenic state of reality in today’s world. For many of us, the fact that Donald Trump was elected president already evoked a strong sense that we had somehow passed into the twilight zone. Over the years of his presidency, this sense has gotten stronger and stronger. Like COVID-19, the Trump virus — that mixture of fear-mongering, appealing to raw emotions and a dose of paranoia — has slowly been infecting growing parts of our world, as recently demonstrated during the siege on the German parliament, inspired by claims that Russian and American troops were on their way to deliver the German people from its tyrannical government which forced them to wear masks.

      At the same time, the fact that a professor’s reference to one of the most common expressions in the Chinese language would provoke charges of racism suggests that bizarreness is hardly confined to the right. Add COVID-19 to the mix, which has created a new dimension of parallel realities, and the scenario for a brand new “Twilight Zone” series practically writes itself.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Infiltration of Law Enforcement by Racist Extremists

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      As protests continue to bring cities across the United States to a standstill, the problem of racist policing is more evident than ever before. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department was the latest in a long line of violent assaults on people of color by law enforcement, and his name joins an ever-growing list of those who have been killed by ones who are sworn to protect and serve. The United States is grappling with the issue of police racism before the world’s eyes, and the scale of the conversation currently happening is unprecedented and, sadly, still not enough.

      While the unconscious bias of some officers of the law has been laid bare for all to see, the conscious and hateful bias of others has remained largely in the shadows. The systemic issue of racial profiling is evident, but the hidden epidemic of far-right activism in police departments around the country is an insidious and even more dangerous threat. The links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves. During the civil rights movement, Southern police chiefs coordinated with local Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many officers and commissioners in the deep South were accused of aiding Klan activity and even being active members of KKK organizations.

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      While this trend seems like an archaic symptom of the era of segregation, links between law enforcement and far-right organizations have remained constant through the 20th century and into the 21st and are now seemingly more widespread than ever. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that a number of deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office had concrete links to neo-Nazi organizations and that a number of cases of police violence against black and Latino communities had been motivated by their racist hostility and “terrorist” sympathies. Likewise, in 2008, a prominent Chicago-area police officer was fired and prosecuted over links to the Ku Klux Klan.

      Widespread Infiltration

      A 2015 FBI investigation found that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies was at epidemic levels, and suggested that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” were using links with law enforcement to gain intelligence and restricted access privileges, as well as ultimately evade capture. The report found that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies across the United States did not screen potential recruits for links to far-right organizations and often turned a blind eye to those recruits with questionable political beliefs.

      The bureau was aware of widespread infiltration as early as 2006, suggesting in a heavily redacted report that white supremacist activists were taking advantage of weak vetting procedures in local law enforcement agencies to gain access to “restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence.” The 2006 report suggested that this was a systematic effort, coordinated by high-profile far-right figures such as William Pierce, and infiltration was seen as a key element in the philosophy of leaderless resistance.

      Despite the concerns and recommendations outlined in the FBI’s latest report, recent research has shown that the links between law enforcement and the extreme right have continued to flourish. Last year, a Reveal News investigation found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers were members of online forums dedicated to Islamophobia, neo-Confederate ideology and even neo-Nazism. Almost 400 police officers from 150 different departments had their identities verified, and many were found to have been actively peddling hate speech, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Proud Boys in particular have strong links to law enforcement, and a number of high-profile investigations have highlighted the extent of the collusion between police and the hate group described as the “alt-right fight club.” In May this year, a Chicago PD officer, Robert Bakker, was found to have been an active member of a Proud Boys Telegram channel called “Fuck Antifa,” where he actively coordinated Proud Boys meet-ups and bragged about his connections in the police department and the government.

      Six months earlier, a police officer from East Hampton, Connecticut, was forced into retirement after his links to Proud Boys groups in the area. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law led an investigation into the officer’s social media activity, finding that he was an active member of the self-described “western chauvinist” group. A year before that, a female officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after she was pictured wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt and was later discovered to have been merchandising Proud Boys apparel on the design-sharing RedBubble website.

      Even in cases in which officers are not active members of hate groups, collusion remains a very real issue. In 2019, police officers in Washington, DC, were pictured fist-bumping Proud Boys members at a July 4 rally in front of the White House. The members of the group were then given a police escort to a local bar, while anti-fascist protesters were met with violence from both the police and the Proud Boys. In an even more egregious case, an investigation in Portland, Oregon, found that a senior police officer had been exchanging friendly text messages with Joey Gibson. Gibson was the leader of the far-right Patriot Prayer, a sometimes violent offshoot of the Proud Boys defined by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

      In the lead-up to a number of high-profile clashes between the group and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, Gibson and Lieutenant Jeff Niiya shared joking messages and talked about Patriot Prayer’s planned actions, with Niiya even confiding in Gibson that he had told officers to ignore outstanding warrants for the arrest of a prominent Patriot Prayer member, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese. A separate investigation found that Niiya had submitted police reports on Gibson’s behalf, launching criminal investigations against “antifa activists” based on footage Gibson had privately sent him. This raised concerns that far-right demonstrators were being given preferential treatment by Portland police, particularly given the reputation for forceful suppression of anti-fascist counterprotest in the city.

      Not Immune

      Although this trend reaches uniquely epidemic levels in the United States, the rest of the world is not immune. A 2019 report showed alarming levels of collusion between law enforcement and violent right-wing extremists in Germany. The investigation, led by the nation’s general prosecutor, found that the extreme-right Nordkreuz group had compiled a death list of leftist activists, journalists and pro-refugee targets using police records and was in the process of planning a major terror attack. It was found that the 30 members of the group had close ties to law enforcement, with at least one member actively employed by a special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.

      A recent investigation by Der Spiegel found that the elite unit, known as the KSK, openly tolerated extremist right-wing iconography and membership, even using widely-known Nazi ciphers such as “88” — code for HH, or Heil Hitler. The investigation uncovered high-level officers openly promoting “national-conservative ideology” and espousing racist ultranationalism. Earlier this year, a KSK soldier who reportedly had links to extremist groups was arrested after a weapons and explosives cache was found in his back yard. The German government responded to Der Spiegel’s exposé by launching its own investigation into the unit, finding that racist extremism was endemic across all ranks. As a result, the unit was officially disbanded in early July.

      As historian Kathleen Belew has shown in her most recent book on the long history of the far right’s links to the United States military, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” the siphoning of weaponry and ammunition from military bases to white supremacist organizations has been a constant tactic of would-be terrorist groups. There is no doubt that the continued militarization of police forces in the United States and Europe, combined with the high levels of extremist infiltration, offers new avenues for the theft of high-grade weaponry and tactics, and further armament of extremist right-wing groups.

      These links between law enforcement and white supremacist organizations are deeply concerning, and present a very real threat to peace, justice and liberty in the United States and around the world. As police racism once again enters the spotlight, it is more important than ever to examine and challenge the infiltration of law enforcement by racist extremists. A centralized vetting process that directly seeks out links to organized racism and excludes candidates with any affiliation with far-right groups is the bare minimum and should be the first step toward a total overhaul of the training and oversight procedures.

      Despite a number of legal challenges to the protective role of policing, law enforcement, at its core, still exists to protect and serve the people regardless of race, religion or creed, and any affiliation with hateful ideology compromises an officer’s ability to execute this role fairly and without prejudice. Until the systemic and personal racism of law enforcement is no longer an issue, we will see more George Floyds, more Breonna Taylors, more murders in the name of law and order. Preventing and eliminating racist bias in police departments across the US is only the first step toward a long process of reckoning and reconciliation.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump and the “Kung Flu”

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      Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have proved immune to his insults (at least in his public utterances). Trump’s favorite targets for public abuse have been Hispanics, especially individuals seeking to enter the country clandestinely along the border with Mexico. He has also complained bitterly and profanely, in a semi-public setting, about immigrants from Haiti and sub-Saharan African countries.

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      This is hardly the end of things. Early on in his administration, Trump imposed a ban, which was overturned by courts, on all Muslims seeking to enter the United States based on popular fears of terrorism. Very much unlike his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who were careful to distinguish between terrorists and the followers of Islam, Trump sought to equate Muslims in general with terrorism, thereby inflaming existing popular fears.

      Classic Demagoguery

      Then came COVID-19, a disease that has taken the lives of nearly 168,000 of Americans to date. After some initial hesitation, Trump labeled it “kung flu.” To cheers and wild laughter at mass rallies and other public events, the president has sought to deflect widespread criticism of his handling of the pandemic by blaming the Chinese — not merely the government but the people in general — conflating the Chinese martial art of kung fu with influenza to the delight of his followers.

      All this, of course, is classic demagoguery intended to mobilize Trump’s base of whites with less than a college education and win him their renewed support at the polls in November. The fact that he actually appears to believe what he is saying adds to the appeal of his message. 

      Trump’s demagogic appeals have consequences for those targeted by his abuse. Using data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, researchers have reported a substantial decline in hate crimes committed against Asian Americans over the periods 2003-07 and 2014-18.  Asian Americans appeared to be well on their way to acceptance by their fellow citizens. The arrival of COVID-19 arrested this development and turned it around. So that, for example, in the three months ending on July 1, another source reported over 800 discrimination and harassment incidents, including 81 assaults, aimed at Asian Americans in California alone. 

      The situation of American Muslims is somewhat different. For members of this religious minority, there was no reversal of the trend toward greater acceptance, simply a continuation of widespread animus. Illustratively, as reported in The Daily Beast, in the two months following the murder of 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, by Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man who reported being a “fan” of Trump, mosques in San Diego, California, New Haven, Connecticut, and Queens, New York, became the targets of arson attacks.

      These crimes were simply the most menacing of some hundreds of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that followed upon the Christchurch killings. Abbas Barzegar, the director of a national watchdog organization that tracks anti-Muslim bias incidents, told The Daily Beast in 2019, “We’ve already reported over 500 incidences of anti-Muslim bias or harassment just this year so far.” Barzegar went on to say that the uptick in anti-Muslim events began in 2015 and continued unabated thereafter.

      Poisonous Atmosphere

      For how much of this is Trump responsible? The answer is not easily quantifiable, but at a minimum, we can say Trump has done little to qualm the poisonous atmosphere in the country. At a maximum, we can claim he has sought to promote a politics of inter-group hatred to advance his career and improve his chances of reelection.

      There is a striking contradiction in this situation. As Trump and his base insult or, in some cases, physically assault Chinese Americans and Muslims, holding the Chinese responsible for COVID-19, individual members of such now stigmatized groups have been busy trying to save Americans from the disease. A long list of Chinese American epidemiologists, emergency room physicians and virologists, led perhaps by Dr. David Ho (director of the Aaron Diamond Research Center at Columbia University) and Dr. Thomas Tsai (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), have been playing vital roles in fighting the disease, often at the risk of their own lives.

      About the same applies to America Muslims from both the Middle East and South Asia. The list here would have to include Dr. Ashish Jha (director of Harvard Global Health Institute), Mahrokh Irani (Harvard Global Health Institute), Dr. Najy Masai and Dr. Imran Siddiqui. Of course, the list could be extended.

      Will these performances by Chinese American and American Muslim physicians and scientists have any impact on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the bigoted perceptions of his base? Probably not. To do so would require Trump voters to link the physicians’ backgrounds to the groups to which they belong and modify their attitudes accordingly — not an easy feat. Further, the president and his campaign operatives have too much invested in his crowd-pleasing rhetoric to change at this late date.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More