A skill for our times
The white power movement does not care who the dictator is. Donald Trump was just handy, says Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” Given Jeff Sharlet’s Vanity Fair piece this morning exploring militias in Wisconsin, that assessment feels about right. The right fringe is dug in.
Conservatives do not back down. They double down. The sedition conviction Tuesday of Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs may cut off the head of the snake, as some suggest, but it will regrow. Violent anti-government sentiment predates Donald Trump. It predates Barack Obama. It predates Timothy McVeigh. Making it whither will require cutting off its food and oxygen.
Belew appeared with Rachel Maddow this week. The point of the white power movement is the seizure of power and establishment of a white ethnostate.
Maria Ressa, author of “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future,” gave “The Late Show” a crystal clear look at how surveillance capitalism has eroded the shared set of facts that sustains any democracy. Social media is an agent of that erosion.
No facts, no truth, no problem.
Social media uses free speech to stifle free speech and splinter society, Ressa warns. “If you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth. If you don’t have truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality. We can’t solve any problems. We have no democracy.”
And that’s just fine with the far right. “Yes, let’s leave democracy behind. The new fascists liked the idea of hastening the end of a liberal order,” Sharlet writes. No facts, no truth, no problem.
The Christian right stands adjacent to the militia fringe somehow. That we should explore. Except they insist on imposing their facts and their truths on the rest of us. It’s a good bet those will be white facts and white truths.