Armed Right-wingers Rally In Houston To Defend Statue — That Nobody Is Attacking

Texas patriots rally to defend a statue of Sam Houston in Hermann Park. Problem? No one wants to tear it down

AMANDA MARCOTTE

Things took a strange turn over the week­end in the bat­tle over the future of var­i­ous mon­u­ments to the treach­er­ous, slave-own­ing Confederacy. Hundreds of peo­ple, many of them car­ry­ing Confederate flags, turned out to Hermann Park in Houston on Saturday to protest efforts to tear down the park’s mon­u­ment to Sam Houston, a for­mer gov­er­nor of Texas and a gen­er­al in the Texas Revolution.

“Antifa has come out say­ing they will be bring­ing sev­er­al large (com­mu­nist) groups togeth­er to host a ral­ly around the Museum District in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2017,” read a post at the Facebook page for the right-wing This Is Texas group. “This list includes Black Panther Party, Antifa & more.”

The prob­lem? There were no efforts to tear down the stat­ue of Houston. This was a hoax. It appears that an alt-right hoax­er pre­tend­ed to be a left­ist online to per­pet­u­ate a fake news sto­ry claim­ing that a group of left-lean­ing activists were going to arrive at the park to demand that the stat­ue of Houston be torn down.

That it was a hoax should have been obvi­ous from the event page at This Is Texas, which alleges that left­ists were mak­ing threats like, “Texans bet­ter not show up or they will limp home bruised, bro­ken, hurt, with their tail between their legs.” There’s absolute­ly no way a Texas-based left­ist orga­ni­za­tion would share the This Is Texas assump­tion that the cat­e­go­ry “Texans” refers exclu­sive­ly to white, con­ser­v­a­tive fans of Confederate monuments.

Watching a bunch of gun-tot­ing wannabe tough guys skulk around Hermann Park, angry about nonex­is­tent threats to a stat­ue most of them have nev­er real­ly thought about before, presents a grand oppor­tu­ni­ty for lib­er­al mock­ery. Beyond that, this entire sto­ry offers an excel­lent illus­tra­tion of why exact­ly fake news is so appeal­ing — and why right-wingers are will­ing to stand by bla­tant­ly false sto­ries even when it gives their lib­er­al oppo­nents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to mock them for being stu­pid and gullible.

At the moment, it seems that the folks behind the pro-statute protest are unwill­ing to admit that they were tak­en in by a hoax. On the Facebook page for This Is Texas, right-wing activists are deny­ing that it was a hoax and spread­ing rumors that antifa pro­test­ers were spot­ted in a bath­room. Many of the right-wing pro­test­ers are sug­gest­ing that “antifa” pro­test­ers were plan­ning to arrive but then were scared off by the right-wingers with their guns and Confederate flags.

The lev­el of defen­sive­ness on dis­play makes it clear that the right-wing pro­test­ers aren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py with being laughed at. So why both­er going to the ral­ly, amid a swirl of rumors that it’s a hoax? And why on Earth would any­one con­tin­ue defend­ing it after the fact, know­ing that doing so just means invit­ing such painful mockery?

The grim answer is that it’s bet­ter than the alter­na­tive — right-wing pro­test­ers’ hav­ing to admit that they just want­ed to hold a white nation­al­ist ral­ly and were will­ing to seize any oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so, no mat­ter how threadbare.

The pro-Sam Houston pro­test­ers open­ly linked their event to efforts across the coun­try to pro­tect mon­u­ments to the Confederacy, activ­i­ties defend­ed on the grounds of “his­to­ry” and “her­itage.” (This Is Texas’ event page claims, “Many of these com­mu­nist punks are embold­en [sic] after they lay claim to a win in New Orleans by bring­ing down the Confederate mon­u­ments.”) But what the stal­wart defend­ers of Texas’ Confederate her­itage don’t seem to grasp is that Sam Houston flat­ly opposed Texas‘ join­ing the Confederacy and was oust­ed from the governor’s office for his resistance.

Yet while Houston opposed the Confederacy, he was a slave own­er and that fact was cit­ed by the online hoax­er as the rea­son imag­i­nary antifa pro­test­ers want­ed to take down the statue.

None of this has any­thing to do with Sam Houston or his lega­cy, except maybe the part where he owned slaves. It was all clear­ly just a pre­text for a bunch of back­ward-look­ing white nation­al­ist types to hold a ral­ly. Which kind of puts pro­test­ers in a pick­le. To admit that the sto­ry about antifas attack­ing the stat­ue was a hoax is to admit that they were just using the Houston stat­ue as a pre­text. Rather than admit that, they would pre­fer to flail around like fools, deny­ing that this was a hoax or that it even mat­ters whether the orig­i­nal sto­ry was true.

President Donald Trump may have made open racism slight­ly more accept­able than it used to be, but it would still be polit­i­cal­ly tox­ic to hold an event titled “Rally to Celebrate Slave Owners.” So instead, it’s a ral­ly to defend from an attack — that’s entire­ly a fig­ment of the imag­i­na­tion — a stat­ue rep­re­sent­ing some­thing vague about her­itage and his­to­ry. Being laughed at for this fol­ly is no fun for these peo­ple, but it may still be bet­ter than being uni­ver­sal­ly viewed as a bunch of racists. http://​www​.salon​.com/​2​0​1​7​/​0​6​/​1​3​/​a​r​m​e​d​-​r​i​g​h​t​-​w​i​n​g​e​r​s​-​r​a​l​l​y​-​i​n​-​h​o​u​s​t​o​n​-​t​o​-​d​e​f​e​n​d​-​s​t​a​t​u​e​-​t​h​a​t​-​n​o​b​o​d​y​-​i​s​-​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​ng/