“Nutter” is British slang for a casually unhinged person. There’s an episode in the British political satire, The Thick of It (think Veep, but far more acerbic), titled “Rise of the Nutters.” It charts the power jockeying of incompetent politicians following a prime minister’s decision to resign.
I offer the nutter reference because most Americans are not nutters. Most Americans share sadness over what happened at the Capitol last week. But there are also a few Americans who believe it is a tragedy that more people weren’t slaughtered. Then there are a few more who support not simply silencing the president’s Twitter (which even German Chancellor Angela Merkel notes is ill-advised), but introducing an American Enabling Act. A new code of speech, this is to say, that grants freedom only to adherents of left-wing orthodoxy. These are the new nutters of the political Right and Left.
Let’s start with the worst of them — those with an unsated bloodlust now threatening members of Congress and their staffs. Others are less threatening but still sympathetic to the idea that elected officials are traitors because they did their duty. A good example here, as some Florida friends pointed out to me, comes from the odd character of Alfie Oakes. Owner of a successful farm-to-table business in Naples, Florida, Oakes attended last week’s protests and has spent the past few days posting increasingly odd rants on his business’s Facebook page.
According to Oakes, “The truth is our founding fathers would have stormed the Capitol and slayed everyone of the traitors to liberty, freedom, our constitution and our country! Sadly for the American people nearly every one of the elected official seated there are these said traitors.”
The riot’s failure to spark a second revolution, Oakes continues, means “we watch the communist takeover of the greatest country in the world.” But hold that thought. Because Oakes also claims that the protest was attended by 1.5 million people but was somehow also manipulated by the “obvious” presence of “six or eight paid actors (used in other events such as [black lives matter] riots, hard to believe they would be that blatant and sloppy) … these paid actors lead the charge.” Oakes thus offers a bold fiction: Up to 1.5 million people were manipulated by a forlorn hope of fewer than 10 actors.
Yet, the comments below Oakes’s posts suggest his rants have at least some support.
Next up, we have the far Left nutters who argue that the riot must now provoke our annihilation of the First Amendment. Apparently unaware that the most pernicious of white supremacists once used an attack on a parliament to seize power, these folks are demanding that news networks no longer report on the president. Oh, and that free speech now be subjugated to a subjective Twitter mob mentality of what actually constitutes free speech.
!! IMPORTANT !!
Dear Networks (yes, Including @FoxNews)
It will be be a gross dereliction of your responsibility to cover Trump’s Alamo, Texas speech live. There is far too much danger for him to use that hollow ground as a launching point to incite a massive and violent event.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) January 11, 2021
Taking a narrow constitutional approach to speech ignores the reality of #WhiteSupremacy and assumes #freespeech rights have been fairly and equally distributed in America.
They haven’t.#HateSpeech isn’t free speech and removing it isn’t censorship.
It’s fairness.
— malkia devich-cyril (@culturejedi) January 11, 2021
Hopefully, this all leaves us with renewed gratitude for the fact that most Americans are not nutters.
