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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly were the USA is headed. The vocal minority wants the civil war to happen. They want to affirm their own epic narrative (https://sivers.org/drama). David defeats Goliath, for the common good.

A lot of young people can't get a hold of their identity, so they grab on to their gender, race, being liberal, whatever. They make a virtue out of anything they already are. Then the journalists exploit the collective search for meaning by selling outrage and a scapegoat. Some people need the "nazis": their identity depends on it.

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Isn't that also what the Nazi alt-right people are doing: grabbing a radicalized ready made identity off the shelf because they don't know who they are?

I see a ton of this today. Maybe it's the social media version of the couch potato. This is what it looks like when people lose themselves in social media.

> This is what it looks like when people lose themselves in social media.

No, this is what it looks like when you have a racist country that doesn't address its institutional racism for decades combined with a racist political party that panders and dogwhistles to them for (at least 5, more like 20) years combined with broken ideas about free speech.

The Democratic vice-mayor of Charlottesville has publicly said he hates white people. Racism goes both ways and some people in both parties are guilty of it.

Whilst I can't defend him saying that, I will point out that it happened in 2009 and it's possible his opinions have changed since.

(Also mildly amusing that the person highlighting these tweets was one "Jason Kessler", a local Charlottesville bloggerm and now presumably the same one enjoying worldwide fame for organising a Nazi-themed march which left someone dead.)

> the person highlighting these tweets was one "Jason Kessler"

I saw it on CNN's website, where Bellamy said he'd grown since 2011 (that's the year he mentioned).

http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/08/13/charlottesville-virg...

Yeah, he did say plenty of stupid things 2009-12 but the "I hate white people" was 2009. Not that I'm giving him a pass for any of this - they were legitimately dumbass idiot things to say anywhere, much less in public.

>The Democratic vice-mayor of Charlottesville has publicly said he hates white people.

Ok. How many white people have been beaten by police under his vile, racist vice-regime?

Oh. Zero, you say?

How many white people have had guns pointed at them by Black Panthers under his vile, racist vice-regime?

Oh. Zero, you say?

Then I think there's a difference. One side says mean things on Twitter, the other side infiltrates police departments and burns down churches.

Zero, I did not say.

According to the ACLU and ABC, police allowed the violence at the march to happen.

> [ACLU Tweet:] Clash between protesters and counter protesters. Police says "We'll not intervene until given command to do so."

> Video replayed over the weekend on cable news and social media appears to show long brawls between protesters and counter-protesters that went uninterrupted by police.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/police-face-criticism-eruptions-vio...

Fighting racism with racism will just make the racists even more racist.

He has since apologized for and disavowed those tweets. He wrote them before he was in public office:

“I sincerely apologize for the inappropriate things I posted to social media many years ago,” Bellamy said in his Facebook post. “Elected officials should be held to a higher standard, and while I was not in office at the time, in this instance I came up short of the man I aspire to be.”

He attributed the tweets to an immature phase of his life.

“At the time of the tweets that I saw posted on the website, I was a young man in my early 20s living outside the Deep South for the first time,” Bellamy said. “In the course of trying to mature and find my way I came to some false conclusions about the world around me and made them known.”

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2016/11/wes-bellamy-cha...

Besides the party pandering, they even elected these monsters into the US Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan

Top-notch Whataboutism, there...

He also filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But he outlasted his "Dixiecrat" origins and repeatedly expressed regret and apologized for his past views. Still, he was never a very progressive party member and not really representative of the party overall.

Other Dixiecrats, like Strom Thurmond, switched to the Republican party when the found the Democratic party no longer in line with their racist views.

> a racist political party that panders and dogwhistles to them for (at least 5, more like 20) years

Closer to 50; the Southern Strategy started with the 1968 Presidential election.

And, really, it was longer than that, in a sense, the Southern Strategy was just the Republicans taking up what LBJ closed the door on Democrats ability to exploit in the South when he backed the Civil Rights Act.

I would frame this on my wall - spot on

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