“White life” and the fascist movement: Hey, at least they’re being honest
The contemporary Republican Party has become the world’s largest white supremacist organization, and now also explicitly supports the use of political violence and terrorism to advance the goal of ending multiracial democracy. Donald Trump’s coup attempt, culminating in the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was the literal embodiment of those values, beliefs and goals.
The foundational premise of the Trump coup attempt and the Big Lie about the 2020 election that fueled it was that the votes of Black and brown people essentially do not count, or at least should not have equal weight with votes of white people, especially white “conservatives” in the former slave-owning Confederacy and other parts of “red state” America.
White supremacy is violence; white supremacist violence is personal, structural and institutional. It is through violence, and the threat of violence, that a society organized around maintaining white privilege across all areas of life is created, maintained, expanded, protected and enforced.
Those who fail to understand Jan. 6 as an act of white supremacist violence effectively deny the reality of what happened that day, along with its genesis, meaning and long-term implications. For today’s Republican Party and the “conservative” movement, the racist “dog whistles” or “coded appeals” required by the “Southern strategy” of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are now almost totally obsolete. Those things belong to an earlier moment when white supremacy had to be cloaked in plausible deniability because majority society increasingly viewed it as shameful.
As the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 presidential election draw closer, the Republican Party and the larger white right will both literally and figuratively drop their masks. They have showed us who they are; we should believe them.
“White life” and the fascist movement: Hey, at least they’re being honest
The contemporary Republican Party has become the world’s largest white supremacist organization, and now also explicitly supports the use of political violence and terrorism to advance the goal of ending multiracial democracy. Donald Trump’s coup attempt, culminating in the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was the literal embodiment of those values, beliefs and goals.
The foundational premise of the Trump coup attempt and the Big Lie about the 2020 election that fueled it was that the votes of Black and brown people essentially do not count, or at least should not have equal weight with votes of white people, especially white “conservatives” in the former slave-owning Confederacy and other parts of “red state” America.
White supremacy is violence; white supremacist violence is personal, structural and institutional. It is through violence, and the threat of violence, that a society organized around maintaining white privilege across all areas of life is created, maintained, expanded, protected and enforced.
Those who fail to understand Jan. 6 as an act of white supremacist violence effectively deny the reality of what happened that day, along with its genesis, meaning and long-term implications. For today’s Republican Party and the “conservative” movement, the racist “dog whistles” or “coded appeals” required by the “Southern strategy” of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are now almost totally obsolete. Those things belong to an earlier moment when white supremacy had to be cloaked in plausible deniability because majority society increasingly viewed it as shameful.
As the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 presidential election draw closer, the Republican Party and the larger white right will both literally and figuratively drop their masks. They have showed us who they are; we should believe them.