January 6, 2021: White Supremacy and Right-Wing Political Violence

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer are historians who are disturbed by our current era which they refer to as an “The Age of Disinformation.”  They observe politicians and media sites purposely misleading voters about the reality of our present environment and the history of our past.  Misinformation is being used to push people in directions that power groups find advantageous.  To counter these practices, they have assembled a collection of essays by historians designed to enlighten readers with accurate descriptions of past and recent events.  This information is collected in their book MythAmerica: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.

Perhaps the most disturbing chapter in the book is the essay by Kathleen Below, a professor of history at Northwestern University.  Her specialties are the white power movement, vigilante violence, and political extremism.  She titled her essay “Insurrection,” using the attack on Congress of January 6, 2021, and its aftermath, as the point of departure for a deep and dark analysis of US history.

The startling events of that day moved many commentators and others to make the observation: “This is not who we are.”  According to Below, “this is exactly who we are.” 

“As historians pointed out immediately, January 6 was American in the truest sense, its action harkening all the way back to the founding of the United States: a moment that both built upon and produced deep and enduring legacies of violence, racism and settler colonialism.  Indeed, one can trace vigilante violence and lynching as foundational to American life and culture from the beginnings of the nation to the present.  Such violence occurred not only in its most well-known incarnation, the spectacle lynching of Black men in the American South between 1890 and 1930, but in other places too.  Mexicans and Mexican Americans faced vigilantes on the border in the early twentieth century in stunning numbers.  Women who refused to marry faced the probability of lynching in the American West, as did union organizers in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Violence to seize and shore up power—a claim to sovereignty through violence of the mob—is fundamentally American.”

Below claims the events of the day were certainly initiated by Trump and many participants clearly thought they were supporting Trump in his claims of a stolen election, but the numbers of people and the degree of violence was controlled by people with a much broader agenda.  She refers to these people as the “white power movement.”  At the end of her essay, the question to be answered by the reader is what is the greatest threat; is it Trump using these people to further his agenda, or is it these people using Trump to further their agenda?

“White power was bigger than simply another version of the Ku Klux Klan…By contrast, proponents of the white power movement were not really interested in seizing local power through mob violence.  Instead, they advocated wholesale revolution through race war.  By 2020, this organized groundswell represented the greatest domestic terrorism threat to the American homeland, according to both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.”

“When it [the white power movement] formed in the late 1970s, it brought together several groups that had previously been at odds with one another, including Klan, neo-Nazi, radical tax resistor, Christian identity, white separatist, and later, skin heads and militia activists.  These groups united with the explicit goal of waging war on the United States and its democratic institutions.”

One might wonder why we know so little about such a horrendous agenda?  Below tells us that is by design.

“The most pervasive misunderstandings of the white power movement come from the early 1980s, when its activists declared open war on the federal government and adopted an organizational strategy called ‘Leaderless Resistance’ to achieve that goal.  Simply put, this meant cell-style domestic terrorism in which white power activists could carry out individual or small-group acts of violence on an agreed upon set of targets with no demonstrable ties to other cells or group leadership.  This strategy was designed to foil the government informants who had infiltrated the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan and make it more difficult to prosecute white power groups in both criminal and civil cases.”

“After it declared war on the United States in 1983, the white power movement wasn’t looking for six thousand people to march down Main Street; it was looking for six people to detonate a bomb.  To be sure, the movement still used public actions to recruit and to disperse its ideology, but the violent center of its activity was not interested in large numbers as much as it was interested in total dedication.”

White power violence is often masked from the public because the media has bought into the notion that any individual committing an act of violence is a “lone wolf.”

“Leaderless Resistance had a much more catastrophic outcome, however, one largely unanticipated even by white power adherents when it was implemented.  It erased public understanding of white power activism as part of a movement, producing the most damaging myth about this history: that of the ‘lone wolf.’  Let me be perfectly clear: there are crimes carried out by individuals.  There are some mass shootings that are not motivated by politics.  But there is no such thing as a ‘lone wolf’ white power terrorist.  The actions carried out by white power activists are part of a coordinated social movement, one that has united people in common purpose and around a coherent white supremacist ideology.”

Perhaps not every group listed above is interested in racial warfare, but each is definitely interested in seeing some components of the US government destroyed.  The notion that they may be supporting each other is not far fetched since all groups seem to find a comfortable home in the Republican Party, where racial conflicts are frequent topics of discussion.

“These activists were motivated by a sense of urgency: they believed that immigration, feminism, abortion, interracial marriage and other social changes would lower the white birthrate and lead to the end of the white race.  In other words, they saw not a soft demographic transformation—the much anticipated moment of transformation when a town, city, state, or nation would no longer be majority white—but an apocalyptic threat.  Today the same constellation of ideas goes by the label ‘replacement theory’ or the ‘Great Replacement.’ And it has found purchase in mainstream politics and cable news commentary.”

It is not important that the casual reader might find dubious the notion that a relatively small number of violent activists could initiate a race war, win it, and manage to eliminate from Earth all non-whites and all traitorous whites.  What is important is that these violent activists believe that it can be accomplished.  They believe it because they have a “bible” that shows them the way.  Their book is a work of fiction called The Turner Diaries.  We receive some perspective from Wikipedia.

“The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder and chairman of National Alliance, a white nationalist group, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.  It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and ultimately a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites and Jews.  All groups opposed by the novel’s protagonist, Earl Turner—including Jews, non-white people, ‘liberal actors,’ and politicians are murdered en masse.”

“The Turner Diaries…has been labeled ‘the bible of the racist right’ by the FBI.”

Below tells us it is necessary that we realize how important the goals and methods described in The Turner Diaries are to the white power movement.  It is also necessary to realize that that book motivates white power groups around the world, not just in the US.

“It would be impossible to understand how a small number of activists thought they could wage revolution without The Turner Diaries, a novel that imagined the success of Leaderless Resistance.  A central text and cultural lodestone for the movement, The Turner Diaries appeared at critical points and in the hands of important activists throughout its history.  The White Patriot Party in North Carolina distributed it to new recruits in the mid-1980s.  The Order, a white terrorist group in the Pacific Northwest, kept a stack of copies in the bunkhouse.  Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, sold it on the gun-show circuit in the early 1990s. 

“The Turner Diaries…was important not because of its quality but because it answered a critical question: how could a fringe movement possibly hope to overthrow the most militarized superstate in the history of the world?  The novel answered this question by laying out a series of strategies, beginning with cell-style terror, infrastructure attacks, and targeted assassinations, and rising to the theft and deployment of nuclear weapons and other mass-casualty attacks.  The Turner Diaries lays out the assassination of all ‘race traitors’ on the ‘Day of the Rope’ and then, after the white power activists win, explains in a postscript the annihilation of all people of color throughout the United States and the world.  It also illustrates an important problem with the phrase white nationalism in describing the movement.”

“People may hear white nationalism and assume it to be adjacent with patriotism, or at the very least consider it as pro-American.  But after 1983 the nation at the heart of white nationalism was not the United States but rather the Aryan nation, imagined as a transnational polity of white people who would need to be saved from extermination through race war and violence.  This is a fundamentally more violent and radical position than that implied by ‘nationalism’.”

A notable scene from the January 6 insurrection was the gallows assembled outside the Capital building.  The media seemed to think it had something to do with the “Hang Mike Pence” chants.  Below suggests that interpretation is completely wrong.  The Day of the Rope in The Turner Diaries was the day on which all the race traitors were hanged.  That would make the gallows a message to all those either in the know or familiar with the tale stating that the day of the rope was coming.

“On January 6, 2021, the white power and militant Right actors were, among the larger crowd, the most organized and well armed, and they posed the greatest threat to the workings of democracy.  So did January 6 follow The Turner Diaries, which features an attack on the Capital meant as a show of force.  And again, while much ink has been spilled trying to differentiate among groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, The Base, Boogaloo Boys, and Atomwaffen Division, all should be understood as part of the same broad white power and militant Right groundswell, one with decades of organizing and resources and, today, with increasing momentum.”

“On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capital, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capital in that novel.  This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold.  Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.”

There are certainly dangerous people out there and they have allied themselves with the Republican Party.  They are committing acts of violence and what is the Republican response?  They try to hide the fact that their allies are committing crimes.

“Even more concerning were deliberate attempts to distract from white power activism in the aftermath of mass attacks on American civilians, often with incontestable evidence about the motivation of the attackers.  Several recent mass shootings carried out by white power attackers have been described in other ways.  For this reason, we still hear stories of ‘lone wolf’ gunmen attacking Muslims in Christchurch New Zealand; Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg; Black Bible-study worshippers in Pittsburg; Latinx people in El Paso.  And these were acts of Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigrant violence.  But they were all carried out by white power activists, all of whom shared the same core motivating texts (including The Turner Diaries), ideology, concerns about white reproduction, and lists of targets.  They are all part of the same movement.”

“But a GOP talking points memo after the 2019 El Paso shooting suggested steering ‘the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.’  This stance not only ignored the threat of the most violent domestic-terrorist movement attempting to attack American civilians but deliberately tried to aid it in its work of disappearance.”

“Here we see the evolution of the myth of ‘this is not who we are’: the rising tide of white power activity and its overt violent racism, on the one hand, and the deepening disavowal and complicity of Republican elected officials and their media allies on the other.”

Is Trump using violent white power groups to support his agenda, or are violent white power groups using Trump to support their agenda—or do they have a shared agenda?

  

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.

Source: http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/12/january-6-2021-white-supremacy-and.html