Hogtown was just treated to a grand parade! The occasion was a guest appearance by the hotsy totsy little Nazi de jour, a pasty faced white supremacist of little consequence named Richard Spencer.
The event was much heralded so the Weazel went to town to get both his prescription filled and his fair share of abuse.
The event took place at the 1750 seat Phillips Center for the Performing Arts located in the Cultural Commons of the University of Florida, a venue that often hosts influential thinkers and performers. Not far away is the O’Connell Center and Ben Hill Griffith Stadium which together can host over 100,000 rowdy Gators and other such sports fans. As such, the University routinely handles large crowds of drunken ill behaved idiots. If you don’t believe me just visit Hogtown during Homecoming weekend.
Richard Spencer has few followers, but like other prominent “Alt Right” buffoons he has found his voice on the world stage by calling for a “White homeland”, “Peaceful ethnic cleansing”, and other such impossibilities. We are a bit short on Nazis here in Hogtown, so Spencer had no choice but to bring in supporters from outside our community.
They must have missed the bus because I searched in vain for anyone who was identifiably Alt Right. Eventually I noticed an innocuous looking fellow in khakis and a button down white shirt darting furtively about.
Many of the protesters were bourgeois in appearance so I thought nothing of it until a burly bearded man standing behind me, apparently an undercover cop, turned to another to say, “There’s one, and that guy is a major prick.” So I took a closer look. I could see that Mr. Normal was practiced at the art of deception, I could tell by his blood-stained hands.
Meanwhile some 2500 protesters marched up and down Hull road waving signs. Despite the vehemence of their chants the crowd was completely peaceful.
For the usual reasons Jews and Negros were much in evidence.
I saw no sign whatsoever of “Antifa”, the Alt Left idiots who are the mirror image of their opponents.
There were a few minor confrontations with Skinheads, but the total mayhem amounted to one bloody lip. Compare that with the aftermath of a football game.
I later learned that after the event a carload of Nazis from Texas took a potshot at a protester. Here are the perps.
They all look alike! Are they Mormons? Clones cooked up by Dr. Mengle? Now that I look more closely, isn’t the guy on the right, the well named William Fears, the same guy I photographed earlier? They all look pretty scared to me.
One thing is certain, no number of cops can ever prevent a crackpot from taking a shot, or from driving his car on a crowded sidewalk.
It wasn’t a riot, just another day on a college campus, so I gazed in horror and amazement at the fortifications and troop movements all around me. Who was responsible for this grotesque overreaction?
Governor Voldemort had declared a State of Emergency, so the entire area, close to a square mile, had been cordoned off with a barrier of dump trucks, construction equipment, and military vehicles. A Sherman tank would have had trouble penetrating the perimeter.
Cops of every variety were everywhere to be seen, and the Florida National Guard was just around the corner hoping to turn the affair into another Kent State.
Most ominous of all were hundreds of heavily armed Nazi Brownshirts.
Don’t get the wrong impression, there weren’t just a few of these guys, but rather hundreds. They were doing large scale maneuvers, blocking the streets, standing atop buildings, and lurking in the bushes, but who were they???
They looked like the National Guard to me, but apparently they weren’t.
I had never seen brown uniforms of this sort before, or at least recently.
So I asked them who they were. They proudly replied that they were QRF, an acronym which I presumed meant Queer Repression Force. They hastened to assure me that it actually meant Quick Response Force.
That didn’t enlighten me much so I asked again. They sheepishly replied that they were all State Troopers, incognito Highway Patrolmen, who had been forced into service by the Governor’s State of Emergency proclamation. No donuts on their day off. It would have been a great day to speed or wreck your car anywhere else in the State of Florida.
Never heard of the Quick Response Force before? Neither has anyone else. I searched the web, there is nothing there. What this means is that the Governor can summon a secret army at a moment’s notice to do his bidding.
Meanwhile, helicopters circled incessantly as snipers took up positions atop the Harn Museum of Bad Art.
But what is that up in the sky? It seems even the Higher Powers had to weigh in.
This was not my first rodeo, nor was it the first time the National Guard has come to town to terrorize the citizenry under the guise of keeping the peace. How well I remember the riots of May 1972. Allow me to take you back to those bygone daze.
A friend and I had spent the previous several days snake hunting in the wilds of Dixie county. Our vehicle was a big old sedan with no radio so we had no idea what was happening in the larger world.
On the morning of May 10, 1972 we were driving down a lonely road when we saw a pickup truck ahead of us screech to a halt; whereupon, the good old boys jumped out and began bashing the ground with their shovels . We had no doubt that they were killing a snake.
It was a big diamondback. The Rednecks only wanted the rattle, so I chopped off the head, gutted it, then threw the carcass into the trunk to cook slowly in the summer sun.
Late that afternoon we rolled into Gainesville from the west. We noticed that our lane was backing up, but no traffic whatsoever was coming from the city. We stopped at 34th Street which was then the edge of town to ask a group of frat boys what was happening. They replied, “The National Guard has been called out and they are going to kick your asses if we don’t do it first!” Huh?
Unbeknownst to us, two days previously Nixon had announced the mining of Haiphong harbor and protests were exploding around the nation, especially here in Hogtown which was already a hotbed of Hippies. We soon learned that on the previous day there had been a major battle in the streets with batons and fire hoses, and that there had been many serious injuries. (To the protesters of course!)
Against the protests of my friend who wanted nothing to do with a riot, I insisted that we park the car and march for the front which was University avenue in front of the school. I wasn’t too concerned because I was already a veteran of many such protests. Growing up in Washington DC gave me that opportunity.
The avenue was full of people singing, “We’re gonna vent our frustration. If we don’t we’re gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse!”
The cheering jeering crowd was confronted by a phalanx of riot police in full battle gear including helmets, full body armor, and shields, plus numerous weapons. Darth Vader hadn’t been born yet, but I assure you it looked like a scene from Star Wars. The National Guard waited in the wings to mop up any survivors.
The cops charged and the crowd broke and ran onto campus. The commander told the cops to stay in the Roman “Tortoise” formation which made them slow but untouchable. A few of the more enthusiastic thugs decided to pause to beat up anyone who had fallen. That was mostly women.
That gave me the break I was looking for, so I whipped out my handy dandy wrist rocket (Never go to a riot without one!) and began shooting straggler cops with steel ball bearings. Did I bag one? Hard to say, because soon I too had to break and run.
The cops charged through campus beating up anyone they could catch. The problem was that in those days everyone had long hair so they couldn’t tell the combatants from the non combatants. When they got to the dorms they heard rock and roll music so they lobbed tear gas into the open windows which set the building on fire. Thus were the frat boys smoked out to join the fray.
I have no idea how many people were hurt, or how many cops and National Guardsmen were deployed, but I do know that it was a war, and a systematic effort was made to suppress the news. Newspapers around the State reported minor disturbances but that was all. I have searched the web and found almost nothing. The best first hand account of the battle that I have found is in the archives of the Iguana.
The skirmishes continued until dark whereupon my friend and I retrieved the car and drove home where we witnessed a miracle.
We popped the trunk to unload the car. There was the long dead rattlesnake. It had been cooking in the trunk of the car in Florida heat for almost twelve hours. It had no head and no guts, just skin, meat, and a backbone. Nevertheless, when I touched it the presumably long dead snake coiled and struck repeatedly. I could hardly believe my eyes. That rattler was tough in more ways than one, eating it was like making a meal out of dental floss with no sauce.
In 1972 as in 2017 the only real problem was an extreme overreaction by the authorities who justify their actions by saying they need to “keep the peace”. The problem is that they don’t want to keep the peace, they want to create fear which serves their larger interest.
The world is full of fear mongers in high places, but I ain’t skeered! It is fear itself that must be resisted. The particular manifestation is merely a symptom, and hotsy totsy little Nazis like Richard Spencer are the least of it.
Perhaps the worst thing about politically based riots is that you have to take a side. This places me in a difficult position because I am a fundamentally conservative person who supports progressive policies. I do so not because it is morally or politically correct, but simply because I want to live in a well ordered world. Desperate people do desperate things, and I don’t want throngs of starving Zombies to disrupt my daily affairs.
As a biologist it is obvious to me that the concept of “equality” is a social construct with no basis in reality. After countless centuries of oppression by overlords equality seemed like a good idea until it foundered on the reefs of human nature and divisions inevitably derived from our personal capabilities.
Jesus once said that the poor will always be with us. Then he said something even worse, that the meek will inherit the earth. What a nice warm fuzzy idea! Let’s examine that.
As we know from the fossil record, humans achieved their large brains and other inherent human characteristics long before we became “civilized”. Being smart was a new trick; but it worked, so we evolved rapidly. Once we organized into agrarian societies with divisions of labor the evolution of our “social intelligence” went into overdrive to produce hierarchical societies. For better or worse this extreme degree of natural selection fostered human advancement and created who and what we are today. To abandon a preference for the brightest and best among us regardless of race is to abandon the most noble experiment ever undertaken by life itself.
There is a possible long term evolutionary alternative, we could become eusocial like certain insects, but I don’t want to be a termite, nor do I want the weak to inherit the earth. I would prefer that the wise do so, much as is happening in China today.
Since we are stuck with the poor and stupid the least we can do is to demonstrate our supposed superiority by giving them both opportunity and a safety net; but, if it were up to me I would give them neither unlimited reproductive freedom, nor the vote. That is how we got Trump.
It is obvious to me that stupid people with inflamed passions always make bad decisions regardless of where they fall along the political spectrum, and more information doesn’t help. The color of one’s skin is irrelevant. I suppose that makes me an elitist, but better to be an elitist realist than to be delusional about any hope that the democratic process will resolve mankind’s problems.
Perhaps we should just try being nice, but Nazis are neither nice nor superior, and that is the real reason why I don’t want them here.
The recent march was a total repudiation of everything the Alt Right stands for. It makes me proud that forty five years after the riots of 1972 the citizens of Hogtown still have the spirit of resistance. Then as now we are willing to fight for what is right!
Weazelwise 