These guys don't like it, either . . .

Yesterday, I mentioned that I thought we’d see more and more violent and deranged behavior from white men as white minority status gets closer and closer to becoming reality.  And then I stumbled across a story which touches on this racist paranoia:

It’s a matter of black and white, says Ryan Murdough, Republican candidate for the State House in Grafton County’s 8th District.

No room for gray area. And no room for Asians or Hispanics or Jews or African-Americans or American Indians, either.

Just Americans. Real Americans. Plymouth Rock Americans. White Americans who bleed red, white and blue. Uncle Sam wants them. To anyone else, don’t let Lady Liberty hit you on the butt on your way out of New York Harbor.

You’re not welcome here.

“I would like to preserve what we have before it gets totally out of control,” Murdough, a 30-year-old father of two young boys, said last week. “The more it becomes non-white, the more it’s going to become a much different place to live, for white people especially.”

Just remember that he’s not a racist:

“I would ask you about your version of racist,” Murdough said. “The word does not have a specific definition. If someone says, ‘You seem to hate people who aren’t white,’ I say no, so I can’t really be a racist, because I don’t hate them. I just don’t want to live around areas that are heavily, predominantly non-white.”

Seems like an airtight defense to me!

Murdough reveres the founding fathers, but Abraham Lincoln? “One of the worst presidents ever. He waged war against the South.”

Slave owners good, Great Emancipator bad.  Alrighty!

Martin Luther King Jr.? Don’t get him started. King was a prostitute-chasing communist who plagiarized his work in college, Murdough says. The heck with the civil rights movement King led. Murdough doesn’t believe in that cause anyway.

“He wasn’t out for civil rights,” Murdough said. “He was out for the black man. If you argue against something that’s politically correct, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jewish issues, you’re persona non grata.”

Ahh, the magic words: “politically correct.”  Think about the kind of power that Murdough (and others on the right) invest in those words.  Murdough calls for an end to non-white immigration, advocates a kind of soft ethnic cleansing and trashes MLK, yet he isn’t a racist — he’s just a victim of “political correctness.”  Those words seem to have the power to excuse anything!

This is an extreme example, of course, but a very similar phenomenon exists within the more mainstream sections of the conservative movement.  Sticking close to home, for example, Carl Paladino sought to excuse his racist emails as “politically incorrect.“  It takes a special kind of person to compare Obama to a blaxploitation pimp or an “uncivilized” African tribesman — to say nothing of the “Run, Niggers, Run!” picture — and then claim to be taking a brave stand against the liberal thought police.  You have to hand it to conservatives — they’ve got chutzpah.

But here’s the thing — “political correctness” doesn’t exist.  I know something of the Left and academia — those supposed hotbeds of “political correctness” — and I can tell you that it isn’t there.  I’ve been in hundreds of meetings, dozens of protests, and who-knows-how-many offhand conversations, and I’ve never once heard an actual member of the Left accuse anyone of being “politically incorrect.”  I’ve been in classrooms — on both sides of the desk — for a few years now, and the same holds true there, as well.  Folks in both locales are concerned about racism, sexism and homophobia, of course, but “political correctness” isn’t even on the radar.

That’s because, for all intents and purposes, “political correctness” was invented by the right as a strawman that would help ease the expression of putrid ideas that had been effectively stigmatized and repudiated after decades of struggle and progress.  Anytime someone mentions “political correctness” they are  — knowingly or not — paving the way for racists and other assorted scum to move further into the mainstream of our political life.  It’s one of the most powerful frames of the last several decades, and decent people should refuse to play along.