Last month, I documented Dan Riehl's reaction to the perceived threat posed to him by, in his words, "pretty young, not that big [black] kids" who never confronted him. He responded, as conservatives of his stripe do, with some juvenile homophobic "humor." Point being, because I'm not inclined to give demonstrably puerile racists the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine my reaction when I read the following in his recent post about ACORN:
Breitbart's video busts told us what they do best. The pathetic part in all this is that they were not just allowed, but encouraged to run wild on taxpayer funding by corrupt liberals, including Obama. They should all hang together if you ask me. How long will it be before corrupt Democrats find a way to back door them the money? I bet they're accustomed to the back door. Maybe Barney Frank should spearhead the effort?In the two short sentences I emphasized, Riehl manages to 1) invoke the language of lynching against the first black President and a predominantly black organization, and 2) equate illegal activity with the sexual practices of homosexual men. He will protest that the latter doesn't make him a homophobe (despite the overt association of homosexual sex with a criminal act) any more than his call for a metaphorical posse to host a metaphorical lynching is evidence of racism. He will be wrong: the fact that the first metaphor that occurs to him when criticizing blacks is a hanging party tells us that when he disagrees with blacks, he couches his disagreement in terms of stretched necks and strangled bodies. People for whom that is an instinctive response are people who are racists. Therefore ...
I'm not saying you're wrong about the homophobia, because you're not, but the reference to "hang together" brings to my mind Thomas Paine before lynching. I'm not saying that Riehl has ever read Thomas Paine, but it's likely he's had that line quoted at him and misquoted it himself more than once.
Posted by: Ahistoricality | Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 08:19 PM
The Paine wouldn't make sense in this context, though, because Riehl wouldn't want to dignify Obama via that particular association. Plus, he's proven himself unworthy of any benefits or doubts ...
Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 08:55 PM
I'm not saying that Riehl has ever read Thomas Paine, but it's likely he's had that line quoted at him and misquoted it himself more than once.
Perhaps if this were an isolated incident we might chalk this up to an unfortunate choice of metaphor. However, this is not the case.
Posted by: Sophist | Friday, 27 November 2009 at 08:58 PM