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We need to talk about how Trump's attacks on Kamala Harris are already following America's white supremacist tradition and in treating people of color as constant threats of potential violence.
Here's what I learned writing AMERICAN RULE.
1/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/american-rule-by-jared-yates-sexton/
Here's what I learned writing AMERICAN RULE.
1/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/american-rule-by-jared-yates-sexton/
We have to understand that the American Right is animated by white supremacist paranoia, a baseless fear that has existed within America since its beginning and rears its head whenever people of color gain any purchase of power.
2/ https://www.themuckrake.com/main/potential
2/ https://www.themuckrake.com/main/potential
Already, what Trump and Republicans are doing is casting Harris, a person of color, as dangerous, aggressive, and as possessing a constant threat of radical violence.
This has a long, long unfortunate history in America, and they're going to play that for all it's worth.
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This has a long, long unfortunate history in America, and they're going to play that for all it's worth.
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We have to recognize that Trump is the literal personification of white supremacist ideology in this country, an ignorant and paranoid figure who sees people of color as inferior, vulnerable to manipulation, and capable of great, status quo-destroying violence.
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We must reckon with the fact that America was built on white supremacist ideology and shaped by the inherent paranoia that accompanies it.
Our laws, our customs, our society were shaped by this paranoia and fear that people of color were inferior and violent.
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Our laws, our customs, our society were shaped by this paranoia and fear that people of color were inferior and violent.
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In part, our founding was influenced by fear of rebellions among slaves and the "need" to have a centralized government ready to act if these people of color might revolt.
This white supremacist paranoia shaped our laws and the direction of our country.
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This white supremacist paranoia shaped our laws and the direction of our country.
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Our "national identity," our myths of exceptionalism and purpose were crafted around white supremacy, an idea that white Americans needed to direct the future, including taming the wilderness while eradicating native peoples and keeping people of color under control.
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While the country grew, fears continued that slaves might revolt, leading the South, during a time of declining political power, to close ranks and drown in conspiracy theories that other Americans were against them and obsessed with enabling these revolutions.
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Like the Right today, Southerners in the 19th century were obsessed with conspiracy theories that other Americans were out to get them and that a huge, undercover plot was focused on eradicating their power and ending slavery.
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This is the true history of the Confederacy. They believed they were carrying on the white supremacist vision of America laid out in the Founding and that other Americans had betrayed this principle.
It was founded in white supremacist paranoia.
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It was founded in white supremacist paranoia.
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After the fall of the CSA, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan attacked and intimidated African Americans and their allies, all under the auspices that these people of color were inherently violent and inferior.
This is what animates white supremacy: the need to control.
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This is what animates white supremacy: the need to control.
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Myths about African Americans, including their inferiority, propensity to violence, and need to be controlled, were particularly pushed by Woodrow Wilson, who revised the history of America in pursuit of white supremacists maintaining power within America.
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The newly-propagandized white supremacist viewpoint of the Civil War and the need for whites to both care for and keep African Americans from being manipulated into violence spread through America at the turn of the 20th century.
White supremacy was renewed.
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White supremacy was renewed.
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White supremacists worrying that people of color could be manipulated into violence found a new focus for their fears with the birth of the Soviet Union.
Quickly, white supremacists believed communists would sway African Americans into overthrowing their country.
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Quickly, white supremacists believed communists would sway African Americans into overthrowing their country.
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The narrative returned from the Confederacy that revolts by African Americans, manipulated by communists, would mean the end of America.
Baseless conspiracies dominated the news, leading paranoid whites to believe they needed to treat people of color like terrorists
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Baseless conspiracies dominated the news, leading paranoid whites to believe they needed to treat people of color like terrorists
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Paranoid whites, terrified that manipulated African Americans, always capable of violence, might lash out, preemptively attacked them.
They were lynched, shot, beaten, their homes and businesses burnt down. There was naked brutality in the streets.
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They were lynched, shot, beaten, their homes and businesses burnt down. There was naked brutality in the streets.
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In the early 20th century, white supremacist "intellectuals" began warning that white dominance was under threat, again sounding alarms that people of color were susceptible to manipulation, incompetent, and, again, constant threats of radical violence.
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Auto magnate Henry Ford believed this conspiracy to be true, and he spread throughout the world antisemitic conspiracies claiming that Jewish people were manipulating people of color and destroying nations.
Unfortunately, this drivel found purchase.
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Unfortunately, this drivel found purchase.
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Fascism embraced the American paranoia. Adolf Hitler read our books, was inspired by our Manifest Destiny, our genocide, our slavery, our Jim Crow laws, and believed our white supremacist conspiracy theories.
It was a direct line from America to the Third Reich.
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It was a direct line from America to the Third Reich.
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Prior to Pearl Harbor, American luminary Charles Lindbergh echoed Hitler's propaganda, calling for America to join Nazi Germany in an effort to save white domination against people of color, all of them manipulated and wildly dangerous.
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In a part of our history often hidden, large swathes of Americans embraced fascism and Nazism. There were rallies with hundreds of thousands saluting Nazi flags mixed with the stars and stripes and portraits of founding fathers like George Washington.
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Post-war, the Civil Rights Movement reawakened the white supremacist paranoia from earlier in the 20th century.
Protesters were again seen as being manipulated by communists, their peaceful protests treated as if they might spark into violence at a moment's notice.
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Protesters were again seen as being manipulated by communists, their peaceful protests treated as if they might spark into violence at a moment's notice.
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Once more, white supremacists painted people of color as inferior, as needing protected against themselves and manipulation, and, as always, capable of potential violence that needed guarded against.
They were traitors, terrorists, existential threats against white power.
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They were traitors, terrorists, existential threats against white power.
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The violence America saw against Civil Rights protesters was "legitimized" as they were portrayed as being manipulated, as being terrorists.
This was the white supremacist order protecting itself, according to them, from an outside agitation and followed tradition.
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This was the white supremacist order protecting itself, according to them, from an outside agitation and followed tradition.
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Our current moment traces its roots back into the 1990's, where Right Wing opportunists again claimed that people of color were on the verge of potential violence and enabled by Democratic politicians and outside agitators.
This is the basis for the modern Right Wing.
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This is the basis for the modern Right Wing.
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Unfortunately, the paranoid white supremacist narrative consistently inspires terrorism, including Timothy McVeigh, who believed he was a soldier in an invisible war against a conspiracy involving the manipulation of people of color into widespread violence.
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Our current moment of Right Wing, white supremacist paranoia is fueled by the rise of propaganda arms like Fox News, which broadcast this conspiratorial nonsense 24 hours a day with only a slight veneer hiding the prejudiced and ignorant core of the narrative.
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In the modern Right Wing, a center-left president like Barack Obama was transformed into an antichrist figure, a tyrant, their entire attack based in the long and ugly American tradition of white supremacist paranoia.
Again, people of color were inherently dangerous.
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Again, people of color were inherently dangerous.
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The Right tells white people they are under attack, that conspiracies between puppetmasters and people of color put them and their families at risk.
It is the same story that has been told since the beginning of America, and it always leads to violence.
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It is the same story that has been told since the beginning of America, and it always leads to violence.
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It was sadly predictable that the BLM Movement, like other movements before it, would be framed as a conspiracy against white people, and people of color against portrayed as always being inherently on the precipice of country-destroying violence.
It is a radicalization.
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It is a radicalization.
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And, as we sadly know all too well, the stoking of paranoid, racist fears by the Right always activates white terrorists, their motives consistently being the need to fight back a conspiracy against them being carried out by violent people of color.
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The disturbing truth is that the conspiracy theory told by the Right Wing in America is simpatico with the narrative that fuels and empowers white terrorist organizations.
The two are connected and the more the story is told the more the terrorists grow in power.
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The two are connected and the more the story is told the more the terrorists grow in power.
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What is happening with the already-virulent attacks on Kamala Harris is a revival of these conspiracy theories and weaponized paranoia.
She is being turned into the face of white supremacist fear, the embodiment of a lie that has been told to Americans for centuries.
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She is being turned into the face of white supremacist fear, the embodiment of a lie that has been told to Americans for centuries.
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Time and time again, the Right has taken people of color and used fear that they are inherently violent to gain purchase with paranoid white Americans and find ways to consolidate power and embrace bald-faced fascism.
We've watched this for months now, and it's only growing
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We've watched this for months now, and it's only growing
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Whatever you think of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, we need to remember this sordid history as we get closer to the Presidential Election.
The attacks started early and are all tinged with this white supremacist paranoia that inevitably leads to fascism.
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The attacks started early and are all tinged with this white supremacist paranoia that inevitably leads to fascism.
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Trump and the Right will do anything to hold onto power, and have recklessly stoked white supremacist paranoia to the point of radicalizing followers and inspiring violence and murder.
We are on the precipice of something very, very dark, and we must recognize that fact.
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We are on the precipice of something very, very dark, and we must recognize that fact.
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