The Politics of ‘But’
Newsweek ran a story last week about an “armed neo-Nazi who attacked an Amtrak train as it hurtled through rural Nebraska.”
Newsweek ran a story last week about an “armed neo-Nazi who attacked an Amtrak train as it hurtled through rural Nebraska.”
Taylor Michael Wilson, 26, from St. Charles, Missouri, pleaded guilty to a federal terrorism charge over the October 23, 2017 incident, during which he brought a train to a halt by disabling its engine. He also cut the lights, causing panic among its 175 passengers.
According to Wilson’s plea agreement, he boarded the train in California carrying a .380 handgun, ammunition, respiratory mask, a hammer, knife, speed loaders, material and identification cards relating to the National Socialist Movement, and a sleeping bag.
The details were pretty shocking — the racial epithets, the violence, the Nazi propaganda, the ISIS ticket, the hallucinogens — but what struck me was that I hadn’t seen anything on the October 2017 incident until an indictment was handed down (I missed earlier Newsweek reporting, but there was no national focus for the most part). So I posted the story to Facebook with this comment: “Imagine if he were black or Muslim — I’m sure it would’ve been all over the news.”
Most of the responses were straightforward — shock, criticism of the lack of coverage — but one caught me by surprise. It downplayed the neo-Nazi connection and played up the ISIS ticket, something prosecutors have not done, and which reminds me of Donald Trump’s response to the Charlottesville rally last year — “there are good people on both sides.”
We live in the age of “but,” a tactic used often on the right to create the impression that they are denouncing evil while signaling to the base that they are safe. (We use it on the left, as well, so no “what abouts,” please, which are the other form this takes.)
Neo-Nazis March in Charlottesville, get violent, and the response from Trump supporters is “but” — but Antifa, but immigrants, but Muslims. Trump’s response is “but” — but there are good people on both sides.
A neo-Nazi attacks a train, and the response is “but” — but the ISIS ticket.
Trump demeans Mexicans as rapists and murderers and adds a “but” — but “some, I assume, are good people.”
“But” is a conjunction, one of the simplest words in the language. Its function is to connect opposing ideas while creating a contrast. In the political realm, however, it serves as a “dog whistle,” or a “coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others.”
Examples of this are the Trump slogan, “Make America Great Again,”which has racist undertones (“again” signaling a time in the past, which in urn signals a whiter America), and Trump’s argument that immigration is “changing the culture” of Europe, which sounds benign but is an argument steeped in white supremacy and racism.
This type of coded language is dangerous because it is more difficult to counter. The built-in cover for racist thinking — it’s about culture or jobs and not about race, they’ll say, or its about the rule of law and not about where immigrants are from or about religion — leaves the press at a disadvantage, partly because we’ve been playing by outdated rules. We, as an institution, allow Trump to traffic in this ugliness, because we need someone to go on the record countering it. So, he lies and we call it a misstatement, or we allow his most egregious comments to gain legitimacy as we play a game of he-said, she-said.
Trump is just the logical outgrowth of our unwillingness or inability to do more than just report the words said. Because we often ignore context and lack the facility — as a media industry and a polity — to analyze syntax and word choice, the racist underpinnings of much of modern conservatism. Law and order, welfare queens, war on crime/drugs, young predators, wilding —but there are good people on both sides.
So, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that someone could look at a man with a Nazi fetish, who possessed loads of neo-Nazi paraphernalia, including ID cards, who claimed to be saving the train from African Americans, who attended alt-right events, and only see the unused plane ticket to Syria and a hand-written note about ISIS as relevant.
But I guess I should’ve expected it.