The “woke left” made right-wingers hate black people and embrace Harvey Weinstein, the Free Press declares

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There’s almost nothing that Bari Weiss’ Free Press can’t blame on “wokeness.” A white woman who called a 5-year old black boy the n-word has been flooded with well over $700,000 in donations from white nationalists and other monsters? Blame the “woke left.” Right-wing conspiracy queen Candace Owen is cheering on still-convicted-rapist Harvey Weinstein? Blame the “vigilante[s]” of #MeToo. 

In a recently posted article on Weiss’ self-proclaimed “heterodox” substack, reporter River Page writes about the appalling case of Shiloh Hendrix, a Minnesota mother who was confronted for calling a five-year old black boy the n-word in a public park. In a video put online by a witness to the incident, she’s defiant, telling him that it was “none of [his] fucking business” if she used the slur, sticking out her tongue and ululating, raising a middle finger, and repeating the n-word several more times. She also said the child deserved to be called the n-word because he was acting like an n-word, whatever racists mean by this particular phrase. The boy is, again, five.

After the video went viral online, Hendrix didn’t apologize for her actions; instead, claiming that she was being threatened, she put up a fundraising appeal on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site popular with white nationalists, saying that she needed $20,000 to help her move her family to a safe place. That might seem like rather a lot to pay for a move, but once the racist right discovered her fundraiser on X/Twitter, they went way, way beyond this not-so-modest goal, throwing money at her to the tune of $742,000, last I checked. She’s now raised her goal to a cool million bucks–which by my rough calculations should be enough to cover several hundred moves–and she may well get it.

Meanwhile, her supporters are leaving behind messages that make clear why they’re sending the cash. “Here’s 10 dollars for your courage and 10 dollars for each of your white kids,” wrote one new fan. “White Lives Matter,” added another. “WHITE FUCKING POWER 🤍🥰.” wrote a third.  

Virtually all these sordid details are in Page’s article, including these racist quotes and a bunch more, and he makes clear that he thinks she’s a bad person and an obvious grifter. But then he goes on to blame the whole thing on … the “woke left.”

“In some sense this story is a decade in the making,” he writes,

and it starts with the zealotry of the left, not the right. The past decade is filled with tales of people who were wrongfully canceled in the fervor of what people like to call the “woke era.” …

[T]he excesses of the left—canceling all those innocent Americans—has triggered an equal and opposite reaction on the right, which has become more and more extreme in railing against cancel culture. The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Hendrix’s unabashed, unambiguous, racist behavior qualifies her as a hero.

I’m pretty sure that the sort of people who scream “WHITE FUCKING POWER” online didn’t magically become extremely racist two or ten years ago because the left supposedly “canceled” someone or other. Their racism is likely a lot more deeply rooted than that–learned from their parents, learned from their community, learned from the racism in popular culture, learned from the racist propaganda that’s now trivial to find or run across online–and Page’s argument reads like an apologia. 

He continues in this vein: 

Basically: The left cried wolf, and now the wolf is here on your phone, calling a little boy in Minnesota the N-word on camera—and there’s a new, identity politics–obsessed far-right waiting in the wings to reward her for it.

“New?” White identity politics is nothing new. I mean, have you ever heard of the Ku Klux Klan?

Page goes on to argue that Hendrix’ racist fans are part of 

what some have called the “woke right,” a version of the far-right that has embraced identity politics in the same way the “woke left” has done in the last decade or so. In this case, the woke right is adopting the playbook of Black Lives Matter, except they’re using it to defend white people.

I don’t even know where to start with this bullshit. No, the racist right isn’t copying Black Lives Matter. They’re adopting the ancient playbook of a deeply entrenched white supremecism that has existed in this country since, well, long before it even was a country. Start with 400 years of slavery, the treasonous rebellion of the Confederation, several different incarnations of the Klan (which boasted some 4 million members at its height in the 1920s), the recent revival of the proudly racist far right, and the capture of the White House by an unhinged racist sociopath who is plunging this country into authoritarianism, cheered on by the millions in his cultish fanbase. Just to mention a few examples. I’m sure you can think of many more. 

I would say that this history of virulent racism in America, which has continued up to the present day, has a lot more to do with the ecstatic racist support for Hendrix’ fundraising boondoggle than anything Black Lives Matters ever said or did. Page may make clear his distaste for overt racism, but his argument echoes that of the antisemites who blame the Jews for supposedly provoking hatred against themselves. Sorry to go there, but it just does. 

Meanwhile, another article in the Free Press makes a similar argument about the current embrace of Harvey Weinstein by some on the right. In her piece, novelist and Free Press culture writer Kat Rosenfield looks at Candace Owens’ strange transformation into a cheerleader for convicted rapist and legendary creep Harvey Weinstein, which Rosenfield notes is something of a counterintuitive choice for the right-wing influencer given her long history of antisemitism and her contention that “Hollywood is run by sinister Jewish gangs.” Owens, who has conducted a series of interviews with Weinstein, contends that he is innocent of all charges–not only in the case of his New York rape conviction, which was overturned due to judicial error (he’s now being retried), but also in his California rape conviction, which still stands. 

Rosenfield claims that Weinstein has become something of a cause celebre of the “extremely online right” and it’s not hard to find Weinstein supporters on, for example, X/Twitter with a little searching and scrolling–including the (unmarried) trad-wife influencer Pearl Davis. But the only Weinstein supporters Rosenfield mentions are Owens and popular podcast blabber Joe Rogan, whose response to Owens’, er, reporting was “I can’t believe I’m on Harvey Weinstein’s side. I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes, and then you listen to it, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’ ”

For her part, Rosenfield is quite convinced she knows what’s going on with the embrace of Weinstein by the “MAGA sphere.” To a large extent, she says, it’s the fault of #MeToo and its dastardly attacks aimed overwhelmingly, she contends, at innocent men. 

[T]he architects of #MeToo … bear a certain amount of responsibility for the shape of this conversation. Because while the original purpose of the movement might have been to protect women from sexual predation, what it became—and what it will likely be remembered as—is a machine that wrecked the lives of men by labeling them sex offenders, without due process, and often without even the most perfunctory concern for whether the allegations were true. …

[C]onsidered in its totality, #MeToo looks mostly like a Salem-style moral panic whose casualties included dozens of innocent—or at least noncriminal—people and, generously, maybe five actual witches. 

Yes, in the entire history of #MeToo there were only five actually guilty parties. She offers zero evidence for this, or, really, for any of her central assertions, preferring to rely on vibes. 

I should note that Rosenfield has a somewhat expansive notion of what counts as a false accusation, at one point proclaiming the innocence of a bunch of different categories of problematic men including, as she puts it, “the boors, the bastards, the gropers and grabbers.” Uh. No. To be sure, it’s not criminal to be a boor or a bastard, but groping and grabbing–those things are actual sexual assault. 

She goes on to make essentially the same argument that Page made about Hendrix’ supporters, in her case arguing that the #MeToo crowd has basically driven people like Owens and Rogan into supporting people like Weinstein, declaring blithely that “of course [#MeToo’s] opponents were eventually going to anoint even [the actual guilty men] as heroes.”

In other words, the online right is “of course” embracing rapists, and it’s somehow the fault of those who helped to get these rapists convicted.

All this just makes me tired, very tired.

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