Eli Crane Is Not the Racist You’re Looking For

It seems like we’re back to one of the most tired, most brainless, and yet most compelling tropes of those on today’s left — namely, screeching, “Racism!” at anybody with whom they disagree politically.

Last week, you heard about the ginned-up, idiotic controversy surrounding Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a quite successful college football coach in his previous career who seems to constantly be accused of racial bigotry despite a lifetime of helping to advance the lives of young adults mostly of African descent.

Tuberville has helped create more black millionaires than anyone in the Senate through his time coaching at several stops as both an assistant and a head coach. It’s hard to see how he would have been as successful as he was in that profession if the players and their parents he recruited and developed thought he was a racist.

But when he was asked about the Biden regime’s efforts to wokify the U.S. military along the lines of Ibram X. Kendi’s scribblings about “antiracism” and other doctrinaire impositions of critical race theory, and specifically through efforts to scrub “white nationalists” out of the armed forces, Tuberville somewhat inarticulately challenged the narrative that the Team Biden definition of “white nationalism” ought to be the operative one.

That statement was made in … May.

Two months later, the Democrats and their house propagandists in the legacy corporate media dragged it out of the archives to put Tuberville on the rack, and he ended up doing a CNN interview with Kaitlan Collins that the Maoist Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution would have given high marks to.

“The thing about being a ‘white nationalist’—it’s just a cover word for the Democrats now where they can use it to try to make people mad across the country. Identity politics: I’m totally against that,” he said. And then he said he’s “against racism.”

Somehow this was put out as a garbled message.

And it isn’t. There are American nationalists — as in, the people who believe in American exceptionalism, or who believe in American national interests, or who find importance in an American national culture — who are of European heritage. Those are white nationalists; the emphasis is on nationalists, and white is simply a descriptive word.

It’s probably true to a very large extent that most of the white people serving in our armed forces would fit within that definition of “white nationalists.”

And Tommy Tuberville is not out of line — particularly as a senator from Alabama, a state that sends a disproportionate number of its young people into the military — in perceiving that the new woke armed forces are attempting to blackball them from their ranks.

By calling them “white nationalists” of another stripe, which is to say that the emphasis is on “white” rather than “nationalist,” and thus “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” become synonyms.

These aren’t simply semantics, particularly where bad faith is involved.

And we know bad faith is involved, particularly when this game is being played not just on Tuberville but on parents at local school board meetings who would rather not have their kids indoctrinated into anti-American critical race theory.

Not all of those parents are Caucasian, by the way.

And then there was this — noting that race-obsessive discrimination is not a recipe for getting us past racism makes you a … racist:

Typical trash from the legacy media

If you commit the crime of noticing people are in high positions due to racial favoritism, then you get called “racist”…even when the beneficiaries gloat about this favoritism themselves.

Joy Reid: "I got into Harvard only because of… pic.twitter.com/Dtwl2kLxNU

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 17, 2023

It’s worth a whole other column, but given how Mesha Mainor has been treated since the Georgia state representative, who is black, opted to flip from Democrat to Republican, the bad faith here is obvious.

We can also see the bad faith in what happened to freshman House member Eli Crane, a Republican from Arizona, who, in a heated debate over this very topic of woke indoctrination in our armed services, used the term “colored people” instead of “people of color” and was subsequently barbequed for it by the Democrats and their media shills:

Crane quickly corrected himself after the “colored people” reference, while members of the Congressional Black Caucus murmured loudly and one of their number, Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio (her district includes most of Columbus), shot up from her chair to demand that “colored people,” as an offensive term, be struck from the congressional record.

His office put out a statement they hoped would make the firestorm go away.

“In a heated floor debate on my amendment that would prohibit discrimination on the color of one’s skin in the Armed Forces, I misspoke,” the statement said. “Every one of us is made in the image of God and created equal.”

Yeah, sorry. They won’t let you off that easy, Rep. Crane. Rep. Beatty, finding herself a great issue by which she could emerge as a prominent civil rights figure, let loose on Twitter about the “racist and repugnant” slip of Crane’s tongue:

(2/2) I will not tolerate such racist and repugnant words in the House Chamber or anywhere in the Congress. That’s why I asked that those words be stricken from the record, which was done so by unanimous consent.

— Rep. Joyce Beatty (@RepBeatty) July 14, 2023

You can say “people of color.” In fact, you are supposed to say it. That’s the “POC” in the new favorite acronym BIPOC, which stands for “black, indigenous, and people of color,” and if you manage to say “BIPOC” in polite conversation it means that you are sophisticated, urbane, inclusive, and enlightened.

Shrink “people of color” down to two words, though, and say, “colored people,” and you’re a horrific racist and almost certainly a “white nationalist.” Just ask Eli Crane, who is in the process of being canceled.

Here’s the very pasty-fasted Steve Benen of MSNBC, who’s a producer of The Rachel Maddow Show:

In case his reference to “colored people” and his proposed policy were too subtle, the Arizona Republican added, “The military was never intended to be, you know, inclusive. Its strength is not its diversity. Its strength is its standards. … I’m going to tell you guys this right now: You can keep playing around these games with diversity, equity and inclusion. But there are some real threats out there. And if we keep messing around and we keep lowering our standards, it’s not going to be good.”

Or put another way, the freshman congressman apparently believes that to care about diversity in the armed forces is to support “lower” standards.

Well, given that “diversity” is the justification given for lowering standards across the board everywhere it’s promoted, a piece of context Benen doesn’t bother with, it seems hard to blame Crane for this.

Benen might want to ask whether the purging of “white nationalists” from the military, and the aggressive deterrence of those who feel in danger of suffering that accusation from applying in the first place, has anything to do with the catastrophic failures in military recruiting since Joe Biden’s inauguration. Of course he doesn’t do that. Tying Tuberville’s struggle session to the one being imposed on Crane, he says this:

It also coincided with new evidence of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Republican administration targeting dozens of voter registration groups with new penalties, and as The Guardian reported, “A crackdown on third-party voter registration groups is … likely to disproportionately affect Floridians of color.”

Remember, all of these developments unfolded just this week — and the week isn’t over yet.

I don’t doubt that the Republican Party would like to receive more support from Black voters. Whether the GOP is prepared to try to earn more support from Black voters is another matter entirely.

Update: As I was writing this, another House Republican, Rep. Bob Good, condemned efforts to mandate diversity and inclusion initiatives in the military. According to a CBS News reporter, the Virginia congressman referenced “white nationalism,” adding, “whatever that is.”

So efforts to prevent voter fraud in Florida and criticisms of race-based military recruitment when it’s a clear failure are evidence that Republicans don’t deserve black support.

And amid all of the folderol over Crane’s supposedly injudicious use of the unacceptable slur “colored people,” there has been absolutely zero mention of the fact that one of the leading organizations in this new push to demonize Republican politicians for their “repugnant” racism has a house made entirely of glass.

For example, back home in Arizona, a prominent political figure named Charles Fanniel attacked Crane. “Shame on him,” said Fanniel. He noted that in “this day and time when race relations are so fragile right now and there’s so much division and hatred,” we simply cannot have white Republicans talking about “colored people.”

“You know, when you get young people like him, especially an elected official … this same type of ideology and mindset is certainly frightening,” said Fanniel. “It’s not welcoming, you know, it’s just like you’re still stuck in yesteryear.”

You may not have heard of Fanniel, but he’s well known in Arizona. He’s the president of the Arizona state conference of a very prominent organization. You might have heard of it. It’s called the National Association for the Advancement of … Colored People.

Seems as though that organization might need a new name. The National Association of Unintended Ironies, perhaps. Or the National Cognitive Dissonance League. Or even the National It’s Fine When We Do It Association.

Perhaps even more descriptive: the National Race-Obsessed Association.

Any way you slice it, none of this stuff is legitimate. Screaming racism over the use of language parsed in ways designed to stifle discussion and enable the howlers and race-baiters is textbook bad faith.

And it is far too late in the day for us to tolerate that. Enough already.

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