Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the putative rise of “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” has been a perennial worry among mainstream pundits, both inside America and abroad. For liberals, the imminent rise of “fascism” serves as a powerful rhetorical device and a political cudgel to be wielded against those on the Right — but even among conservatives there is occasional and genuine concern that racism as a political force might be making an ugly return, especially among the young.
Are people right to worry? Or, to pose the question in a slightly different way, is there really a political future for “white nationalism”? Thankfully, a very recent online controversy sheds a (fairly embarrassing) light on both of these questions. As we shall see, it is indeed true that the internet is filled with politically conscious “racists”, and that the idea of “white nationalism” seems more popular than ever among a certain segment of America’s millennials and Zoomers. But it is equally apparent that racism simply isn’t what it used to be. Far from being dangerous rebels, we instead find yet another tribe of “lost penguins“; radical political orphans without a party or a patronage machine willing to take care of them, and with no will or ability to build one on their own. To understand why, we must turn to a very modern fairy-tale: the tale of the legendary Waffle House Valkyrie.
The “Waffle House Valkyrie” is the nickname of the protagonist of a recently viral video, depicting a late night brawl at (where else?) a Waffle House. A black woman is filmed raising her chair as if to throw it at a white woman behind the counter, who gestures mockingly as though inviting the black woman to throw the chair at her. The chair is duly thrown, and the woman behind the counter deftly and gracefully deflects it before grabbing it out of the air.
To normal people, this was just another amusing viral video. But in certain corners of the internet, it was, at least for a short while, transformed into something more. To these people, the woman in question became a “shield-maiden”, a “Valkyrie”, and an “Aryan wife”, supposedly standing up for white people against the random criminality of America’s black citizens. Like previous virally famous women on the internet — such as the Crimean prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya — a good deal of fan art was created in a short time, as well as a good helping of memes.
To take an example, the British online personality Carl Benjamin (better known by his nom-de-guerre, Sargon of Akkad) reposted a picture of the Waffle House employee with glowing eyes and the caption “Stand alone if you must, but you must stand”. The subtext here isn’t particularly subtle, and many of the comments made explicit what Benjamin himself only alluded to — this was an example of White America finally taking a stand against its unruly minorities. Finally, the white man (or woman, as the case happened to be) was fighting back.
All this hype lasted until the star of the show — the Valkyrie herself — posted a video in which she told her side of what had happened that night. At this point, everything started going wrong. The woman in question spoke like a member of southern Louisiana’s lowly white working class. Enthusiasm turned into disgust, and even in some cases rage. When people found out the woman had a black boyfriend, the jig was up, and it became open season for everyone who wanted to vent their hatred for the “ghetto trash”, “garbage”, “hoodrats”, and “negroidified whites”. “Millions must die”, one anonymous account quipped, and those “millions” of people whose lives would be snuffed out to set America straight again would include many or most white people, for they were simply too far gone to be saved.
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