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The mainstream media's response to the incident on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial has gone this way and that. The incident was at first seen in its main climatic moments (smug white kid in MAGA hat, Native American drumming peacefully). Then another and longer video revealed a wider world of confusion that involved three groups, two of whom represent extreme positions on women, race, and sexuality. One group, represented by Native Americans, appeared to be moderate. One group represented extremism from the very bottom of society (Black Israelites, a group whose philosophy is not that far Rastafarianism).

The last, those MAGA kids, represented it from the very top. The Black Israelites and the MAGA kids, however, do not exist on the same social and class and historical plane. The former have no power whatsoever. Indeed, they are lucky not to be in prison. The latter does does have access to real American power. The MAGA group's actions and words do matter. As a consequence, one extreme group that essentially represents white power is socially permitted, and the other can be dismissed as ridiculous. The Black Israelites will never make any kind of history, except by total accident.



The current dominant reading of the expanded recording of the incident is that the blacks were racists and homophobic, the Native Americans were dishonest and even made the situation worse with their dumb drumming. And the white kids were, to use the words of Donald Trump's son, a "bunch of nice Catholic kids." The result? According to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump has invited them to the White House. But the White House has disputed this claim. And so, more confusion has been tossed into this growing confusion.

To make some sense of this incident one, of course, should not end with the widened world presented in the longer video footage. The truths in it are all still very limited. One should do as the best philosophers always try to do, which is to leave the confines of a fragment, which is, after all, a small part of a much larger world in space and time, and perform what the famous French post-structuralist Gilles Deluezes described as a survol. This word, as one of his translators states, is derived from survoler, "to fly over," but Deluezes's use, as philosophers are always fucking with ordinary words, includes this meaning: an effort to survey "the whole of the visual field... from a distance."

This distance is also the perspective of Walter Benjamin's angel of history (Angelus Novus), the angel whose "face is turned toward the past" and "where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet." As regards the United States, some of that wreckage was hurled at the stone feet of President Lincoln this weekend.