The right.

[Belacqua]

I like traditional style art.

To me, much modern art looks like it was painted by an epileptic monkey.

Never understood the fascination with Picasso

So, I'm a white supremacist?  Why don't I know these things?

See, this is the problem the white supremacists are making. 

I also like traditional art and architecture a lot more than modern stuff. So I was happy to find the twitter accounts that focus on those things. But the bigots are trying to pretend that art and architecture are getting worse because of certain groups of people -- mostly Jews and immigrants, but also Muslims. 

The evidence they use is of course stupidly selective. If they're talking about Abstract Expressionism, for example, they don't talk about Pollock or de Kooning. They'll focus on Rothko, who was Jewish. I actually saw one guy call him "swarthy," which is a bigot euphemism for "Jewish." 

I pointed out that urban planning has been harmed by Le Corbusier (a white European man with fascist tendencies similar to white supremacists) and improved by Jane Jacobs (a Jewish woman). This got me blocked. 

Recently the Trump administration announced that all new public buildings have to be built in Neoclassical style. On the surface it seems like a matter of taste, and one that I have sympathy for. The Capitol in Washington is far superior to Boston City Hall, for example. But the trouble is that Trump is allied with all kinds of white supremacists, who have been using Neoclassicism as a rallying cry against all the usual enemies. No one who has been paying attention thinks that Trump would call for good taste in architecture for aesthetic reasons.

---

Meeting unashamed bigots on Twitter taught me more about how they think. There seem to be two related methods they use to be bigoted.

First, they will look at a huge and diverse group of people and focus on the very worst members of that group. So some small percentage of black people are criminals, and some Jewish people only care about money, and some Muslims are terrorists, and some gay men are pedophiles. The bigots point to that small percentage and pretend it is an essential characteristic of the whole group.

Of course they neglect the fact that there are also non-black people who are criminals, and non-gay men who are pedophiles, etc. etc.

The second, related method for being bigoted is to take some flaw that is common to human beings, or some downward trend in society, and pretend that only one group is to be blamed for it. So if architecture is getting uglier, it is the fault of Jews, or if the streets aren't safe, it is the fault of one minority group or another. Maybe some Christians don't think clearly about science, so a bigot will pretend that it is characteristic of Christianity to be stupid about science, and that society would be smarter about science if there were no Christianity. They are neglecting the fact that plenty of other people don't know science, and that any sort of person is capable of faulty reasoning, prejudiced conclusions, etc.