By OMAR KHAN
A civil war sparked from racial tension is the last thing on my mind — that is until I met a hippy-looking man preaching unity and found out he is an avowed “racist.” Then anxiety heightened into fear. It looks like the alt-right isn’t just a bunch of memes.
Recently Rutgers University started to feel the fear, targeted and teased by white supremacist groups. People were and are angered by an invisible threat. However, they end up playing the fool.
Identity Evropa, the infant alt-right supremacy group, has played us all as fools. The middle-aged racists traveled all the way to Rutgers to post fliers for media attention. They want people to get pissed and get the local newspapers to highlight their “recruitment”.
Just yesterday, The Tab published an article promoting a new organization, Blood and Soil. They know they’re not going to get a horde of recruitment by putting fliers in downtown New Brunswick. The damn racists are just marketing. You put their posters up online on news platforms and they become visible and legitimate to any clown who searches their name. By spreading out their posters and getting media to write about them, any actual member who is thinking about joining, comes up with the bright idea that the organization is not only everything their patriotic fathers dreamed about, but that there are others all over the country.
There is one set of posters that started sprouting up, and this one was way more interesting in message as it boldly claimed, “it’s ok to be racist”. I personally wouldn’t get offended let alone care about a piece of paper, but words hit people like a shotgun in a lot of different places. What caught my goldfish-esque attention was that I knew the guy who posted them. My source for all this information is Al Stankard, or Harlem Venison, as he is known to many alt-right readers.
Three months ago, I didn’t know jack shit about the alt-right and considered them a mediocre meme of 2016. Then a random racist decided to pop out of the woodwork and show me what kind of people really exist. Harlem describes himself as a DMT junkie whose dharma is one of bringing people together. He believes that to truly bring together the fallen-apart society we call modern day America we need to understand the legitimate grievances of minorities, including the alt-right. However, as an upstanding member of liberal society I had no idea what kind grievances this alt-right had. I personally haven’t encountered someone who was willing to call himself a part of the alt-right. However, when I met this man, dressed in war-torn clothes and carrying a hiker’s backpack, I felt like he would be fun to have around. My natural instinct propelled me to an odd encounter, and I sensed with my absent third eye that hopefully it would bring me some real-time excitement. As my partially autistic body guard tried convincing him about Rothschild conspiracies, I was ironically running a booth promoting peace. The real irony was the peace I was peddling was the one they were living in — a peace so blissful and just that they need not worry about the struggles of minorities, let alone a racist one.
From my short times with Al, the last thing I could classify him as was a racist. However he really wanted to dawn the moniker to prove a point. I personally wouldn’t get offended by a piece of paper, but words hit people like a shotgun in a lot of different places. I didn’t realize people cared until a friend on social media was hit so strong she indented “NOT” into the logo. Luckily for me that prompted me to realize what he had done. People were actually pissed at someone I saw as harmless. The word itself created more of a monster then the man who said it.
Al’s confusing art exhibit wasn’t actually saying it’s ok to hate people. Rather it was an attempt to make people think twice about the word racist: how society can easily silence a voice when they hear it coming from a racist “Nazi” — another word Al thinks has been wrongfully applied to the alt-right. In his eyes the alt-right is broad and vague. Some of them are literal Nazis, others are more wacky than hateful. He himself does not hate other races or discriminate against others. His dharma or his goal in life is to bridge the gap between liberals and the alt-right, two groups of people he fears might spark another civil war. He’s pushing for open dialogue, but how open can you get in front of a “Nazi”?