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Scott Olson

A tipper informed me late yesterday that an email sent to an academic listserv by local weatherperson Cliff Mass contained nothing but bad (I would even say dangerous) advice about how the nation should deal with white supremacists. He was responding to an email sent by the president of the University of Washington, Ana Mari Cauce. Her email contained a link to post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website about "what college leaders can do when extremists descend on campuses."

The post points out that the openness college campuses expose them to attacks by neo-Nazis. This is the strategy of the fascists of our times: Exploit the very democratic institutions and public spaces (such as the Westlake Center) that they want to destroy. This is a complicated situation, and the best that colleges can do, concludes the post, is to be "just ready" for the kind of violence and mayhem that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend.

Cliff Mass' response? The whole of America should simply ignore these neo-Nazis. Why? Because they are desperate for attention "and we are letting them have all [the attention] they want." He even thinks there is something shameful about the president of University of Washington emailing her community about what happened in Charlottesville. That kind of thing is for CNN, writes Mass, and not UW, which is "one of the great research universities in the world."

From his email:

Hundreds of millions of people are watching the video of the actions of one sick, 20-year-old, and his small band of buddies. It seems to me that such incidents should be buried and we should efficiently and quietly deal with the criminal behaviors. That would be the more effective response

So, he wants us to ignore white supremacists because they are just a "band of buddies." It seems Mass does not know who the president of the United States is. If he bothered to watch CNN now and then, he might learn that this president imposed a racist Muslim ban at our airports and wants to build a wall to keep brown people out of his country. Also, this president took two days to respond to an act of white supremacist terrorism. Mass appears not to know that the "one sick, 20-year-old" charged with killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people was raised in a society that for several centuries used black slaves to build much of its economic foundations. Maybe he has not connected any of the dots. Maybe he thinks that black poverty has nothing to do with the violent history of racism and slavery. Maybe he thinks those young people in Durham, North Carolina, pulled down that statue because it is ugly and will soon erect a better-looking one. What planet does this man live on?

White supremacy, like global warming, is something you should never ignore or try to bury.