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ku klux klan
Donald J. Trump Is Not a Member of the KKK—But He Sure Sounds Like One
For Trump there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism.
May 12, 2026
“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic." —President Donald Trump, greeting British King Charles on April 28, 2026.
“The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address are descendants of the Magna Charta— supreme symbols of Anglo-Saxon souls striving for freedom, justice, and humanity. Anglo-Saxons established this Nation, wrote its code, and sent their sons into the wilderness to gather fresh stars for the flag. . . . The making of America is fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon achievement. Anglo-Saxons brains have guided the course of the Republic. Our ideals are Anglo-Saxon, our social traditions, our standards of honor, our quality of imagination, and our indomitability.” —from “Americans Take Heed! Scum O’ The Melting Pot,” a 1921 KKK pamphlet.
Donald Trump’s most recent contribution to his year-long “America 250” celebration was truly bizarre, with British King Charles somehow serving as a symbol of the heritage for which the American Revolution was fought. That Trump simultaneously posted a photo of the two leaders, under the heading “Two Kings,” only added to the weirdness. But, as Jonathan Chait has noted, along with many others, accompanying the weirdness was something dark and dangerous—the idea that the US is an “Anglo Saxon” nation, and that the idea of “freedom” announced in the Declaration of Independence is a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant idea that is “alien” to “alien” peoples and cultures.
It was thus interesting that on the same day that he feted King Charles with encomiums to their common Anglo-Saxon heritage, Trump also announced his new “America 250” commemorative passport, featuring on one side an enormous drawing of his head against the background of the Declaration, and on the other the famous John Turnbull painting of the Continental Congress. Trump’s Kim Jong Un impression notwithstanding, it is entirely fitting that he would commemorate his “America 250” vision with a passport, for the policing of borders, long with the massive campaign of immigrant kidnapping, AKA/detention, and deportation, are the hallmarks of his administration.
Trump made this commitment clear while speaking at the Republican National Convention and accepting the party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2024, reiterating what he has been saying for well over a decade:
The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I, you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.
The Trump administration’s violent and sometimes murderous assaults on Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and especially Minneapolis, began only months ago and continue still, even if in less obtrusive ways. Mass deportation is simply one element of a much broader attack on refugees and immigrants. Last November, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced a total ban on reviewing asylum applications. Common Dreams reports that “Not a single refugee who isn’t a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report.” Meanwhile, Trump continues to disparage Somalia, its people, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in viciously racist ways, recently doubling down on his vile 2018 comment:
Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.
For Trump, there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism. It sometimes seems as if he is single-handedly trying to validate the most radical versions of the “critical race theories” that he hates, personifying a past, and present, of exultant White supremacy.
Trump is hardly the first White supremacist to occupy the White House. And yet, in a sense, his every move confirms what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed back in 2017, in labeling him “The First White President.” “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power," Coates argued. "In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
While Trump has many ideological predecessors—George Wallace springs immediately to mind—one has to go back an entire century, and to a perhaps unexpected place, to locate a public figure who so powerfully conjoins racism and xenophobia.
Back in May of 1926, the North American Review--founded by Boston Brahmin intellectuals in 1815, and widely considered the first significant literary magazine published in the US—featured just such a figure: Hiram Wesley Evans, the Vanderbilt University-educated author of a substantial, 30-page essay entitled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” Evans was an up and coming public figure seeking to promote the restoration of American Greatness. He was also the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). And his essay, described by the editors as an “authoritative paper on the Ku Klux Klan by the foremost representative of that Order,” inaugurated a symposium featuring essays by four “writers of national authority”: Martin J. Scott, S.J.; Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple Emmanu-el, New York; W. E. Burghart Du Bois, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and William Starr Myers, Professor of Politics, Princeton University.
It may seem surprising that such an eminent journal would feature a serious symposium on the KKK centered on a substantial essay by its “Imperial Wizard and Emperor.” But indeed, the KKK—boosted by the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation," whose legendary ending featured the glorious rescue of vulnerable Whites by heroic Klansmen on horseback—had just experienced a rebirth under the leadership of William J. Simmons. Simmons was a vicious racist. He was also a patriot, and he dedicated his organization to the “sublime principles of a pure Americanism,” and declaring that “[T]he Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy.”
As Linda Gordon notes in her 2017 classic, The Second Coming of the KKK, by the 1920’s the Klan was a nationally important organization whose reach extended far beyond the South and claimed between 4 to 6 million members. More important: “the 1920’s Klan’s program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920’s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries.” Over the course of the decade, it elected governors in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas., and exerted influence in a range of other states from Ohio and Michigan to New York.
The organization was particularly strong in Indiana, where in the mid-1920’s it claimed both the state’s governor and a majority of both houses of the General Assembly. Gordon indeed opens her book by describing a 1923 Fourth of July Klan celebration that attracted thousands of supporters in Kokomo, Indiana, and which featured a speech by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. The speech—entitled not “Why We Hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews” but rather “Back to the Constitution"—declared: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. . . The American Revolution was fought for principles of self-government…then embodied in a federal constitution the like of which man never seen, are sacred now as they were then.”)
By 1923, Hiram Wesley Evans had been named Imperial Wizard of the Klan, supplanting Simmons and initiating a campaign to raise the profile and advance the political influence of the Klan. “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” was, in effect, his vision statement. And its parallels with the rhetoric of Trump’s MAGA movement are chilling.
Evans begins by noting that while in 1915 the nation was “in the confusion of sudden awakening from the lovely dream of the melting pot, disorganized and helpless before the invasion of aliens and alien ideas. After ten years of the Klan, it is in arms for defense . . . “ The Klan, he insists, is dedicated above all to “the idea of preserving and developing America first and chiefly for the benefit of the children of the pioneers who made America, and only and definitely along the lines of the purpose and spirit of those pioneers.”
According to Evans, the Klan hates no one, and simply seeks to protect the American homeland from invaders who threaten true Americans: “We are a protest movement—protesting against being robbed . . . our great cities . . . taken over by strangers . . . the Nordic American is today a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.”
And while Evans denounces the alien hordes, he also blames “liberals” (also referred to as “Mongrelized liberals”) for the civilizational crisis at hand, insisting that liberalism “provided no defense against the alien invasion, but instead has excused it—even defended it against Americanism. Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial, and spiritual treason.”
As America is being besieged by enemies without and within, he insists that “the Klan alone faces the invader . . . the Klan is the champion, but it is not merely an organization. It is an idea, a faith, a purpose, an organized crusade,” one that indeed has “won the leadership in the movement for Americanism.” Standing firmly “against radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds,” Evans insists that the Klan alone stands for American Greatness without apologies: “We believe, in short, that we have the right to make America American and for Americans.”
The anticipations of Trump here are striking.
Trump does not explicitly denounce Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Blacks in the manner of Evans and his turn of the 20th century Klansmen, nor does he invoke the language of “Nordic” racial superiority in the manner of Evans, who praises “the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestantism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are condensed into the Klan slogan: ‘Native, white, Protestant supremacy.’”
And yet, minus the reference to “instincts of loyalty to the white race,” it is easy to imagine Trump speaking in much the same way. The distinction between real, Anglo-Saxon Americans and aliens; the contempt for people of color; the obsession with stemming a literal alien invasion; the representation of liberals and radicals as traitors to the nation—these are the core themes of Trumpism.
Trump does not wear a white robe and pointy white hat, or claim to be a Grand Wizard, or burn crosses, or talk of Nordic racial superiority. He does display a remarkable solicitude for tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis, Confederate battle flag carriers, violent Three Percenters, and Proud Boy insurrectionists.
But Trump is no Klansman. He is the twice-elected President of the United States. And yet his defensive, xenophobic, and frankly reactionary vision of “Americanism” bears a striking resemblance to the vision put forward a century ago by the Klan—a group whose ideology was, and is, closer to the center of American politics than we might like to believe.
Contributor's note: I would like to thank Robert Orsi and Bob Ivie for their comments on this piece.
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Scapegoating Turns America’s Streets Into a Shooting Range for ICE and Border Patrol
The first thing officials in the Trump administration did after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was to blame them, not the trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents nurtured by Trump’s scapegoating.
Feb 01, 2026
I don’t remember ever hearing federal officials so quickly, in unison, blame the victim as after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7 by an agent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. And as quick after the killing of Alex Pretti two weeks later on January 24 by agents of US Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol before principally operated within 100 miles of the US border, hence its name. That changed with the so-called immigration enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) under President Donald Trump. With the lines between ICE and Border Patrol blurred, when protesters shout “ICE Out,” they mean both.
Both killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. That is, ICE’s transformation under the Trump administration led to their killing. A metamorphosis in which scapegoating is one motivating force to justify scaling up ICE and its deployment into the Twin Cities, tagged by DHS “Operation Metro Surge.” Victim blaming is one manifestation of the Trump administration’s overarching scapegoating propaganda machine.
German documentarian Neal McQueen reminds us of the poisonous functions of scapegoating in his comparison of the rise in Germany in the 1920s of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force Sturmabteilung (often called “Brown Shirts”) and today’s ICE. “No moral equivalence is asserted,” he writes of his comparison. What he does do is highlight how both organizations, his words, “constructed their ideological purpose through scapegoating.”
Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology?
Scapegoating is nothing new in the US. The Ku Klux Klan (“KKK”), one example, has been a paramilitary group supporting its purpose via scapegoating. As historian William Trollinger wrote, while “the original Klan concentrated its animus against the newly freed slaves and their Republican Party supporters,” the Klan growth in the 1920s relied upon an “expanded list of social scapegoats that included Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.”
But the KKK hasn’t been an armed force within the executive branch of the US government as is ICE. With ICE becoming more so with the ballooning funding and personnel expansion during President Trump’s second term.
President Trump has proven himself a master of using scapegoating to maintain and grow his political power, as Jess Bidgood at the New York Times chronicles. His targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities in Minnesota a latest example.
A video posted in December 2025 by a conservative YouTuber alleged fraud in some Somali-run childcare centers. Allegations refuted in follow-up investigation by the state. But damage done, as President Trump and his minions ramped up attributing fraud to all of Somali descent in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the majority American citizens.
What the video missed was actual fraud occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic. And the biggest fraudster then was the convicted white female founder of Feeding Our Future. That fraud involved providing a publicly-financed nutrition program with false counts and invoices of meals provided to children. Some of Somali descent participated in the fraud, but only around one-tenth of 1% of all Somalis in the Twin Cities.
Repeatedly we hear the focus of Trump’s immigration enforcement is deporting “the worst of the worst.” The word “worst” said referring to criminal and violent undocumented immigrants. But analysis at the Cato Institute indicates these are not the vast majority of immigrants being rounded up and deported. In practice, as America has witnessed in Minneapolis and elsewhere, “worst” means not being white.
Scapegoating is evident in the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In likely nurturing trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents. And in blaming Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti.
Within two hours of Renee Good’s killing, the victim blaming started, as analysis by ABC News documents. A post on X by DHS stated Ms. Good “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over” ICE agents “in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” And President Trump joined in with his own post that day writing:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer… it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.
Vice President J.D. Vance also jumped in, blaming Ms. Good, as did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. All the victim-blaming lies, revealed as such in the video analysis by New York Times, that by the Guardian, and others.
When the officer shot through Ms. Good’s open driver-side window, he clearly wasn’t run over. Instead, he was positioned with Ms. Good as a target he couldn’t miss. And after all the shots were fired, you can hear him say “fucking bitch.” He then walked away, casually as if leaving a session at a shooting range proud to have hit the bullseye.
Looking at the video of Ms. Good’s killing, I can’t help but think the ICE agent already knew he had immunity before Vice President Vance announced it later that day. Knew when he shot with his gun pointed through the window at Ms. Good’s head.
A private autopsy performed for Ms. Good’s family revealed she was shot three times; in the breast, forearm, and head. The wounds of the breast and forearm were deemed not immediately fatal. But the head wound was deemed more immediately so.
And why was Ms. Good’s killer taking video of her license plate. Probably because he and other agents were told to collect identifying information on protesters; protesters joining an enemy list with Somalis. And, as should be expected, as in all wars enemies get killed.
Victim blaming continued with the killing of Alex Pretti. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, held a news conference a few hours after this fatal shooting saying:
…an individual [Alex Pretti] approached US Border Patrol agents with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a border patrol agent fired defensive shots…This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
And at her news conference the same day, DHS Secretary Noem’s victim blaming was identical word for word.
But video shows Alex Pretti did not brandish his legally-carried gun. Nor violently resist. With instead holding his hands up above his head, cell phone in one hand. What violence there was happened when Border Patrol agents threw him to the ground and held him down.
One agent appeared to step back with Mr. Pretti’s gun in his hand having removed it. Then gunfire heard. Not by one officer, but two. The first shots finding Mr. Pretti motionless lying face down. Then agents stepping back fired a rapid blast of more shots into Pretti’s still body, analysis indicating a total of 10 shots fired.
The preceding description is consistent with the moment-by-moment video analysis of Alex Pretti’s shooting by CNN. And, also, by ABC News and the New York Times. And with sworn testimonies of eye witnesses.
When I watched videos of Mr. Pretti’s killing, I couldn’t help but wonder how the agents felt when firing their rapid volley of bullets. Was it to them, as the scene intensely felt to me, like a moment of target practice as if at a shooting range?
Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology? More that than of agents performing disciplined immigration enforcement?
Rep Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) seems to wonder that himself in his letter on January 12 to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noems, writing:
DHS seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists. It uses white nationalist “dog whistles” in its recruitment campaign for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that appear aimed at stirring members of extremist militias… which participated in the insurrection… ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and were convicted of their offenses [but Trump pardoned]?
Aside from recruitment messages already winking to extremists, Washington Post reported on future ICE recruitment plans (also discussed on Democracy Now) to reach attendees at, for instance, gun shows and NASCAR races among other venues.
After the killing of Mr. Pretti, the killing of Ms. Good not sufficient alone, President Trump said he was “de-escalating” the surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minnesota “a little bit,” replacing Commander Greg Bovino with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan.
Then again, an ICE agent also told an observer in Minnesota just days after Alex Pretti was killed, “You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.”
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The Disappearing Face of Authority
When those who enforce the law hide their faces, democracy itself is under threat. But history shows people can—and have—pushed back.
Jul 23, 2025
In Los Angeles, they came at night, black helmets, tactical gear, no names, no insignia. Protesters were grabbed off the streets and loaded into unmarked vans. No one knew who they were. No one could ask. Their faces were hidden. Their power, absolute.
We are entering an era in which the agents of state power no longer have faces.
Across the country, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in upstate New York to militarized police responses in Atlanta, Chicago, and Portland, Americans are increasingly confronted by law enforcement officers whose identities are concealed. Their names stripped from badges. Their faces obscured by masks, goggles, and helmets. Their authority rendered anonymous.
The stated rationale is familiar: protection from doxxing, retaliation, or harassment. And in an age of hyper-polarization and digital vigilantism, those concerns are not entirely unfounded. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Ali Soufan warns, “Visibility puts a target on your back in the age of online extremism.” That may be true. But the inverse—faceless authority—puts a target on democracy itself.
The mask is not a neutral tool. It is a statement. And it is one that a free society cannot afford to make lightly.
At what point does protecting the enforcer obscure the principle of enforcement?
A democracy policed by faceless enforcers is not merely a tactical adaptation. It is a philosophical departure.
In literature, masks symbolize both freedom and concealment, rebellion and repression. Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” But there’s another truth lurking beneath: Masks don’t just enable expression; they also enable erasure.
Social psychologists have long understood this. In 1969, Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo conducted a now-classic experiment in which participants donned hooded robes and were instructed to administer electric shocks to others. Unsurprisingly, the masked participants delivered higher shocks, exhibiting greater aggression and reduced empathy.
Even children grasp this dynamic. In a Halloween study, masked kids were significantly more likely to steal extra candy than their unmasked peers. A hidden face, even for a moment, grants permission to break the rules.
When combined with state power, anonymity can override individual conscience and turn human beings into instruments of group will.
The history of masked violence in America is not speculative; it is foundational. The Ku Klux Klan’s hooded anonymity wasn’t incidental. It was central to their terror. By day, Klan members were judges, sheriffs, or civic leaders. By night, they became ghosts, free to punish without consequence.
In Nazi Germany, SS and Gestapo agents wore masks during night raids, not only to instill fear but also to psychologically distance themselves from their crimes. In Chile under Augusto Pinochet, secret police donned balaclavas while abducting dissidents. In Iran under the Shah, SAVAK agents masked their faces during torture sessions to erase accountability.
This tactic is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes: concealment of identity to enable unchecked violence.
It is crucial to approach such parallels with care. No one is saying that masked ICE agents in American cities are equivalent to Gestapo squads in Berlin. But the comparison should serve as a warning, not a distraction. The question is not whether history repeats perfectly, but whether we are ignoring its lessons.
Of course, law enforcement officers face real threats. They have been harassed, even targeted for violence. Those risks are real and deserve attention. But the solution cannot be to erode public accountability.
We do not allow judges to hide their names. We do not permit anonymous juries. Our system of justice, however imperfect, relies on visible responsibility. To abandon that ideal in the name of safety is to accept a dangerous new social contract: one in which power flows only one way.
But here’s the hopeful truth: When communities resist the normalization of masked authority, they can win.
In Portland, Oregon, during the 2020 racial justice protests, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals deployed in camouflage uniforms and unmarked vehicles detained protesters without identifying themselves. The move drew national outrage and lawsuits. Oregon’s attorney general filed suit to stop these “secret police-style” tactics, and public pressure led to federal inspectors general investigating the practice. By 2021, Congress passed a provision requiring federal agents deployed in civil disturbances to display visible identification showing their name or a unique ID code and their agency.
In New York, years of grassroots organizing by groups like Communities United for Police Reform led to the June 2020 repeal of Section 50‑a, a decades-old law that had shielded police disciplinary records from public view. The change came amid mass protests, underlining how collective action can dismantle policies of anonymity that enable abuse.
In Oakland, California, the issue of hidden identity became headline news in 2011, during the Occupy Oakland demonstrations. An officer was caught on video covering his nameplate with tape, a violation of departmental policy. He was suspended for 30 days, and his supervising lieutenant was demoted. Public outrage led to stronger rules requiring all Oakland officers to display badge numbers and name tags even when outfitted in riot gear.
These victories didn’t happen overnight. They were the result of sustained advocacy and legal challenges. And they remind us: Faceless authority can be challenged, but only if we refuse to accept it as inevitable.
The logic of masking metastasizes. Today it may be ICE. Tomorrow it could be traffic cops, school resource officers, or regulators enforcing housing codes and environmental policy. Once anonymity is normalized, it becomes nearly impossible to roll back.
Imagine being confronted by a law enforcement officer whose face is completely obscured. What would you feel? Fear? Confusion? Powerlessness? These are not accidental responses. Perhaps that is the point.
But a free society cannot function on intimidation.
We live in an open society. Police do not rule us; they serve us. To wear a badge is to accept a burden, to be known, to be scrutinized, to be restrained by the public’s gaze.
The philosopher Michel Foucault warned that power is most effective when it is least visible. But the inverse is also true: Power is most just when it is most seen.
A democracy cannot thrive on ghosts. It requires people, real, visible people, making visible decisions in the full light of day.
So, what can be done?
To stop the normalization of faceless power, we can:
- Demand transparency laws banning face coverings in non-high-risk operations;
- Support local watchdog journalism that documents abuses of anonymity;
- Join campaigns for demilitarizing police departments and banning unmarked uniforms during public interactions; and
- Insist on civilian oversight boards with real teeth to enforce accountability.
The mask is not a neutral tool. It is a statement. And it is one that a free society cannot afford to make lightly.
If we want a future where power serves people, not the other way around, it begins with insisting that authority shows its face.
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Donald Trump, The Treasonous Confederate Army's Last General
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power.
Mar 26, 2025
It has been 160 years since the last shots were fired in the deadliest war in U.S. history, in which up to 750,000 Americans died in a rebellion by Southern states to preserve slavery. Devotees of the Confederacy have never surrendered the Lost Cause mythology, and it’s increasingly apparent Donald Trump and his administration are among them.
The Confederacy went to war to defend the antebellum economic, social, and cultural system, an autocratic fiefdom of slave states run by an oligarchal plantation class enriched by a virulent racialized foundation. “Into the hands of the slaveholders the political power of the South was concentrated by their social prestige, (and) property ownership” that created their wealth through chattel slavery and the lie of Black inferiority, wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his 1935 opus Black Reconstruction in America.
The world that marries white supremacy with authoritarian rule that inspires those who wave Confederate flags and venerate Confederate monuments is replicated in Trump’s aspirations. It filtered through Trump’s first term, most notoriously in his embrace of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose removal of a Robert E. Lee statue as “some very fine people.” But it is fully unleashed in Trump 2.0.
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power, this time under a guise to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The revisionist portrayal of the Civil War slipped out from the Pentagon under Trump loyalist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Post reported, “scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website,” part of a “broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to (DEI) from its online presence.” DEI “is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” intoned a Pentagon spokesperson.
Biographies of prominent Black, Latino, and women service members were suddenly erased, from Sgt. William Carney, the first Black American to earn a Medal of Honor during the Civil War, to prominent heroes of later wars. Though public outrage forced restoring recognition of the service of Jackie Robinson, World War II Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated Japanese American unit while Americans of Japanese descent were interned, and the famous Navajo Code Talkers, most of the erasure remains.
Along with other purges, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, veteran Black Army leader Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and replaced him with a less qualified white man after Brown recorded a four-minute video about conversations with his son following the police murder of George Floyd. That act exposed the fabrication of “merit” behind the anti-DEI crusade while also reimposing a portrait of white men as the presumptive standard of qualification.
“The full throttled attack on Black leadership, dismantling of civil rights protections, imposition of unjust anti-DEI regulations, and unprecedented historical erasure across the Department of Defense is a clear sign of a new Jim Crow being propagated by our Commander in Chief,” said Richard Brookshire, co-CEO of the Black Veterans Project.
The DEI crusade
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed executive orders and directives to eradicate “all DEI related offices and positions; equity action plans, actions, initiatives or programs; equity-related grants or contracts; and DEI performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
Next Trump overturned President Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces,” noted constitutional law professor Melissa Murray, “were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.”
A systematic purge of employees in federal agencies led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) followed. Not coincidentally, it had a disproportionate impact on Black federal workers, as well as women and LGBTQ employees. Trump also, without evidence, blamed DEI hires for the disastrous National Airport plane crash.
Concurrently, Trump targeted legally mandated equal employment opportunity and civil rights offices that empower federal workers to file complaints and enforce antidiscrimination laws, through multiple federal agencies. Cuts also harm public health, including programs to reduce racial and gender disparities in maternal and infant health, cancer, and chronic disease.
A number of private employers have followed suit, including Amazon, Meta, Google, Walmart, Target, Goldman Sachs, Pepsi and McDonalds, ending programs intended to expand diversity within their own workforces. “Five years ago, (many) were posting about Black Lives Matter,” says Theodore Johnson, a senior adviser at the New America think tank. Now these companies are “following government cues,” getting rid of race-conscious policies as they scramble to comply with the administration’s directions.
Education has been a major assault with mandates that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, alleging they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” note professors Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith. The goal of redefining education also seeks to indoctrinate a new generation of young people in conservative ideology. Private colleges were not immune, especially as Trump slashed Biden-era initiatives and federal funds to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges, and Hispanic institutions, while forcing others, like Columbia University, to silence and criminalize dissent.
Trump has made DEI the cudgel for efforts to erase post-Civil War Reconstruction and subsequent New Deal and Civil Rights movement reforms, while seeking to reimpose Jim Crow era segregation and one-party rule. All while evading legal statues, court orders, and shaking down media and law firms deemed disloyal, punctuating the agenda of a monarchial coup in progress.
Trump’s executive order bidding to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright citizenship symbolizes this push. It represents a full-throated attack on what radio host Clay Cane calls “a “bedrock principle of American democracy. To dismantle it is to open the door to the erosion of all rights gained through the blood, sweat, and tears of those who came before us.”
In his seminal work The Second Founding on the Reconstruction amendments and laws, historian Eric Foner argues they “not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what [abolitionist Sen. Charles] Sumner called ‘the custodian of freedom’.”
A key phrase of the birthright citizenship clause, Foner emphasizes, says no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… for the first time (it) elevates equality to a constitutional right.” The Equal Protection Clause became the vehicle “for radically expanding the rights” for all “persons” not just citizens.
Aided by the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for Black men, the reforms “inspired an outburst of political organization” with “direct action to confront long standing discrimination” and created new state constitutions creating “the region’s first state-funded systems of free public education,” and other democratic reforms that produced “a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.”
Overall, the second founding, observes Foner, “forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national state and were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy.”
That’s what is at stake today. Public protests have forced some setbacks for the Trump coup. It will be up to all of us to escalate those efforts with the same focus of street actions, mass protests, and a united front that led to prior eras of expanded rights in order to protect a genuine democracy.
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Remembering Rev. Nelson Johnson and the Historical Record
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths.
Mar 02, 2025
On Saturday, February 22, one of America’s great civil rights and labor activists was laid to rest in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s possible you haven’t heard of Reverend Nelson Johnson, though Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the dynamic founder of Repairers of the Breach, the “co-anchor” of the new Poor People’s Campaign, and professor of the practice of public theology and public policy, places him (and his wife Joyce Johnson) in the rank of “Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr.” It’s salient in this moment, too, that the social, racial, and economic rifts that sparked the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and claimed the lives of five of Reverend Johnson’s fellow activists—scarring him for life—continue to divide our country today.
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths. Given this, it’s imperative to correct the historical errors and omissions in a recent New York Times obituary for Reverend Johnson.
The obituary reports that when, just prior to the November 3, 1979 murders, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis arrived at the start of a march Nelson Johnson and his fellow communists were mounting against racism, the police were “standing nearby.” This isn’t true. The police were, by official order, absent and out of sight and therefore unable to stop the approaching violence. What makes this particularly alarming is that at least three law enforcement agencies—the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms—had elicited enough information from informants and infiltrators to stop the white supremacist attack before it happened. Every serious investigation of the November 3, 1979 events over the last quarter century acknowledges this.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
Klansmen and Nazis inflicting violence on African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Latinos, Native Americans and left activists is a horrific though unsurprising fact of American history. However, we must not omit from this history the responsibility of the public officials charged with protecting and serving all our citizens. The very foundation of our democratic system rests on the implicit and explicit trust we place in state officials and institutions to protect us in situations like the one that led to the Greensboro Massacre.
The Greensboro Massacre reminds us, as we are being reminded again today, that the only way to preserve that trust is to hold officials accountable when they betray it and commit crimes. Sadly, our justice system did not find the vigilante white supremacists or complicit officers of the law criminally responsible for the November 3, 1979 murders. Only a federal civil suit brought a sliver of justice to the tragedy. The New York Times obituary notes the civil judgement that found eight defendants liable for death but does not tell readers who they were: Five were Klansmen and Nazis, one was a police informant (and former FBI informant), and two were Greensboro police officers. This judgement reminds us that we must continuously resist the influence of reactionary white supremacist politics in our law enforcement agencies and justice system.
The obituary concludes with the installation of the 2015 North Carolina state historical marker commemorating the massacre. Left unreported, however, is the tenacious and hopeful work, not only by Reverend Johnson, but by Greensboro’s civil society, to set their history right. Thanks to these groundbreaking efforts, which included a two-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the City of Greensboro offered two apologies for the massacre: one in 2017, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and another in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This second apology explicitly acknowledged that the Greensboro Police Department could have prevented the violence on November 3, 1979. Movingly, the city established a scholarship fund in the names of the five slain activists.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
It’s also important to remember, however, that Reverend Johnson’s historical significance is far greater than the trauma of November 3, 1979. His 60 years of racial and economic justice activism may be seen as an essential bridge, spanning from the revolutionary visions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Dr. William Barber’s current mobilizations on behalf of our nation’s poor. Like both these leaders, Johnson saw race and economics as inextricably linked. And like them, he never stopped trying to fix the root causes of inequality in America for all people suffering predatory capitalism. He came to consider demonizing others, even one’s enemies, as a mistake. That revelation would lead him away from communism to liberation theology and the idea of revolutionary, Christian love. This philosophical shift, however, didn’t transform Johnson from radical to reformer; he never stopped believing that true equality and justice in the United States will only come with fundamental changes to our values, our institutions, and our economy.
Reverend Johnson’s community-based work has inspired labor and racial justice leaders all around the country. Though his name might not, until now, have been known widely, his work with unions and churches and social justice organizations has been buttressing grassroots democracy for decades.
The life of this big-hearted farm kid from the Airlie, North Carolina expands the geography, timeline, and scope of the conventional civil rights story. Getting his story right broadens our understanding of American history’s lessons, affirms a powerful faith in equal justice and democracy, embraces the power of community, and rejects the repression of our country’s truths.
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Trump’s Visit to Howell, MI Turned a Dog Whistle Into a Bullhorn
The former president spoke of sending outside police to Detroit to Intimidate voters in a place with a troubling history of white supremacist and far-right activity.
Sep 04, 2024
When former U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would speak in Howell, Michigan on Tuesday, August 20, the dog whistles could be heard loud and clear. It was a signal to the president’s white nationalist supporters that he was still on their side. Howell accrued a reputation for open racism and white supremacism when Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles set up shop just north of the city. Although Miles died in 1992, cross burnings continued, and the house of a farmer who had spoken up for a proposed Drag Bingo event was vandalized with pro-Klan graffiti as recently as 2021.
During Trump’s speech, which was recorded although not open to the public, he fantasized about sending Livingston County police to Detroit to intimidate voters. “I’d love to have them working there [in Detroit] during the election.” Trump defended his appearance in Howell with a rhetorical question: “Who was here in 2021?” The answer was President Joe Biden. Be that as it may, Biden did not decide to campaign in the city a month after neo-Nazis had demonstrated their love for him in the same city.
One month to the day before Trump’s speech, on July 20, neo-Nazis and Klansmen marched through the city of Howell. Neo-Nazis sieg heiled and shouted “We love Hitler! We love Trump!” in a rally that coincided with the former president’s visit to Grand Rapids. On August 17, the day Trump announced his stop in Howell, a similar rally occurred in Brighton. Many Michiganders who saw pictures or videos of the rallies probably naively shook their heads at what they imagine is a purely Howell or Livingston County phenomenon.
The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history.
Yet, those who say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen aren’t who “we” (here meaning Michiganders outside of Howell) are, could not be more incorrect, in fact, dangerously so. The Ku Klux Klan flexed its political muscles across the state throughout the 1920s. In 1925, the Klan-backed candidate Charles Bowles almost won the mayoralty of Detroit. The Michigan KKK pushed a statewide ballot issue that would have banned parochial schools in a fit of bigotry against Catholics. Prominent Michiganders such as Dan F. Gerber, founder of Gerber Baby Foods, were Klan members.
Although the 1920s Klan declined amidst sexual and financial scandal, its torch was picked up in Michigan by the Black Legion. The Legion, immortalized in a 1937 Humphrey Bogart film, launched violent attacks against Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and labor unions. In his autobiography, Malcolm X states that his father was murdered by the Legion. The group was blamed for a total of around 50 murders. Prominent political figures were counted as members, including the mayor and chief of police of Highland Park. It was only a federal investigation brought about by the Legion’s murder of federal employee Charles Poole that ended the group’s reign of terror.
The German American Bund, founded in 1936, was dedicated to spreading the ideas of Nazism in the United States. Like the Legion, the Bund was memorialized in film: 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In 2017, the Oscar-nominated documentary A Night at the Garden recounted the 20,000 strong rally the Bund held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. The Bund has multiple Michigan connections. Bund fuhrer Fritz Kuhn worked in a Detroit Ford plant before founding the group. The group also built summer camps for young American Nazis across the United States, including Camp Will and Might in New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in New York, Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin—and Camp Eichenfeld, about 12 miles north of Pontiac, near US-10.
Camp Eichenfeld bustled during the summer months. The leader of the Detroit Bund John H.B. Schreiber said that the camp, which flew a flag with a Nazi swastika alongside the Stars and Stripes, hosted between 500 and 700 people every weekend. Bundists also packed into the German-American Restaurant on the northeast corner of E. Jefferson and E. Grand Boulevard in Detroit for monthly outings. Today, the story of Detroit’s Nazis is nearly entirely forgotten, buried in old issues of The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. It was only with assistance from employees at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library that I learned about it. The national Bund reeled under investigations from federal officials before finally closing up shop for good after the U.S. entered World War II.
This was not the end of fascist activities in Michigan, though. Demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith preached the fascist doctrine in print and over the airwaves. Smith made an unsuccessful run for Senate that garnered over 100,000 votes. A new group, the National Workers League, continued where the Bund had left off. The League was one of the groups that incited a riot against the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, because most of the families living in the project were Black. Parker Sage, the head of the League, and Garland Alderman, the secretary, were arraigned after the riots. Those charges were dropped so that Sage, Alderman, and William Robert Lyman, also of the League, could be indicted in Washington D.C. for sedition. After a 1944 mistrial caused by the death of the presiding judge, the charges against the League members and their co-defendants on the far-right were dropped.
Even members of Congress from Michigan echoed pro-fascist sentiments. Congressman Roy O. Woodruff inserted a letter into the Congressional Record that included the alarming phrase: “We do not need to fear Hitler.” Another Congressman, Clare E. Hoffman, saw a beneficial side to Nazism. The U.S. “might now profit…” he advised, “from what Hitler has done by adopting at least some of his decent methods of production…” Hoffman’s speech was given as France was falling to the Nazis. Two months before Pearl Harbor, Congressman George A. Dondero said in Congress “The greatest danger menacing the United States today is not invasion or attack by the Axis Powers but the trend of socialism and communism.”
Running the license plates of the far-right demonstrators, Livingston police determined that several were not residents of Howell or Livingston County. That should give pause to those living outside of Howell who think they and their neighbors are paragons of tolerance. The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history. We must now decide if it will be our future as well.
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The Rise of White Nationalism Alongside the Second Coming of Trump
The KKK does not choose to support Donald Trump because he is a Republican but because they agree with the ideas that he (and other far-right Republicans) spout.
Sep 18, 2023
In 2020, The Daily Show ran a segment in which statements by Republican leaders, including Donald Trump, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and various Fox News personalities were juxtaposed with those made by Ku Klux Klan leaders like former Grand Wizard David Duke and former Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkerson. Fired Fox News commentator Tucker Carson, for instance, screeches manically that, because of immigration, “eventually there will be no more native-born Americans.” Immediately following that comment comes former Grand Wizard Duke saying, “We’ve got to start protecting our race.”
Donald Trump is then shown at a rally (with several Black people behind him wearing “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts) saying about Covid treatments, “If you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line. Discriminating against white people!” Again, there’s a cut to Duke stating, “There is racial discrimination going on right now in this country against massive numbers of white Americans.”
All too sadly, it didn’t take much effort then, nor would it now, to demonstrate that the racist “great replacement theory” that contends white Americans are being radically displaced by immigrants underlies an ever-fiercer defense of so-called Christian nationalist identity. And in our time, that defense has been essential to the rise of what has become the Trumpublican Party and the fierce growth of white racism that’s gone with it.
That Daily Show segment ended with the ultimate irony of Ted Cruz claiming that “the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan.”
No surprise there. Despite the all-too-obvious convergence of the perspectives of the Republican far right and the white supremacists of the Klan, as well as other avowed racists, Republican party leaders continue to vehemently deny any identification with the KKK or its views. In the process, they regularly issue obligatory statements rejecting bigotry, racism, and anti-semitism, while passionately disavowing Duke and others like him — all disingenuous and empty gestures of the first order.
Recent Republican behavior paints a very different picture. Earlier this year, for instance, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) got thoroughly twisted in knots trying to defend his statement that “my opinion of a white nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist, to me, is an American.” Eventually, he had little choice but to (largely) retreat from that stance — at least officially.
Typically though, whatever they may claim, Representatives Greene and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) had no problem hanging out with racists and neo-Nazis — until, at least, they got caught doing so. In February 2022, they both spoke at the America First Political Action Conference that brought together Islamophobes, hardline nativists, and others on the far right. The gathering was organized by prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Yeah, the very same Fuentes who would have dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago that November.
Like Trump after that feast, when busted, Greene stated, “I do not know Nick Fuentes. I have never heard him speak. I have never seen a video. I do not know what his views are, so I am not aligned with anything that is controversial.” Despite Trump’s dubious assertation that he didn’t know Fuentes either, he certainly knew his old pal Ye and the controversies generated by a number of his antisemitic statements.
Endorsed by Duke
In 2021, it was Gosar and Greene along with Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) who attempted to launch an America First Caucus that would champion “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” A secret paper, uncovered by Punchbowl News, discussed the forming of that caucus and the rationale behind it (addressing the supposed threat of “mass immigration” to “the long-term existential future of America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity”). No need even to say “white,” of course. After the document was revealed and some Republican leaders criticized the initiative, all parties involved backed down (at least in public).
Time after time, key Republican figures have leaned into the ethos and ideological aims of white nationalism. It’s no wonder that America’s racists, including the KKK, have fallen in love with the modern Trumpublican version of the Republican Party. Once upon a time, of course, and for decades thereafter, the Klan was deeply linked to the southern wing of the Democratic Party — the Dixiecrats, as they were then known — but began to switch to the GOP as presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then presidents Richard Nixon (with his infamous “southern strategy”) and Ronald Reagan exploited white feelings of resentment towards the Civil Rights Movement and the national Democratic Party’s support for racial equality.
In a research paper published by the American Sociological Review, David Cunningham, Justin Farrell, and Rory McVeigh argue that the Klan played a small but meaningful role in the transition of the Democratic South from blue to red. In a number of areas, there was a correlation between the rise of Klan activity and the southern shift to the Republican Party.
It should be noted that, from 1989 to 1992, David Duke even served as a Republican in the Louisiana state legislature. Like most white southerners then, he had been a registered Democrat until, in the late 1980s, he joined a regional shift to the GOP. National party leaders did denounce Duke, but local Republicans were far more ambiguous in their dealings with him. He also ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican and for president in the 1988 campaign, first on the Democratic and then the Populist Party line. That year, he formally switched to the Republican Party, clearly showing which party at any moment best reflected his white nationalist ideology.
The day after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president in 2016, Duke announced a run for the Senate in Louisiana, saying, “I believe my time has come. The people of this country, the patriotic, decent, God-fearing people of this country are now right with me.” He promptly also backed Trump, claiming that voting for anyone but him for president would be “treason to your heritage.” And Trump would prove to be in no rush to disavow him (though, in the end, he finally did).
Duke’s time, of course, hadn’t come and he got few votes. Still, more recently, the Klan and the GOP got new life when Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thought it a good idea to liken African American Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Black scholar Ibram Kendi to what he called “the modern grand wizards of the modern KKK.” Klan leaders, he added, would be “proud” of her. He claimed that all he wanted to do was “provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” presumably about race, a subject in which he had previously never shown the slightest interest.
Ramaswamy is Hindu and of Indian background. His color and his faith put him at odds with the hardcore evangelicals and white nationalists of the GOP base who have supported Trump. He has tried to argue, aware of that constituency’s prejudices, that he also adheres to Christian values and believes in Jesus.
He now claims that he’s personally never met a white supremacist and that racism in the United States mainly comes from the political left. Like other conservatives, he contends that racism is an individual flaw, rather than systemic, structural, and institutional. Despite a plethora of public rallies by avowed racists, a horrifying series of racist-driven mass murders, and a Homeland Security Department report that white supremacist extremists “will remain the most persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland,” Ramaswamy dismisses the danger of white supremacy as a kind of myth. As he put it, “I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacist exists somewhere in America. I’ve just never met him. Never seen one, never met one in my life, right? Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner. And maybe those exist, too.”
Sorry, Vivek. For the Black people who were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina, Buffalo, New York, and Jacksonville, Florida; the Jews murdered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Latinos slaughtered in El Paso, Texas, white supremacy is no joke.
While being roundly criticized by Democrats and civil rights leaders, Ramaswamy mostly received crickets from fellow Republicans. In interviews, no one ever seems to have asked him about how his pledge to support Donald Trump, should the latter become the Republican presidential nominee, puts him in the position of offering his stamp of approval to a candidate who was actually endorsed by Duke (twice!).
In 2016, Duke infamously announced his fierce support for just one presidential candidate — Donald Trump, of course. In a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on February 28, 2016, Trump initially pretended, all too unconvincingly, that he had never heard of him. (“I don’t know anything about David Duke.”) The next day, after coming under fire, he claimed that he had been wearing “a very bad earpiece” and had misheard the exchange. He then stated, “I disavowed David Duke.”
Trump knew just who Duke was, having discussed him in other interviews in previous years. As early as 1991, he told CNN’s Larry King that support for Duke’s run for governor of Louisiana was “an angry vote,” even if he then failed to address the racism at the heart of Duke’s campaign. In 2000, he did call Duke “a bigot, a racist” on NBC. At the time, Trump was flirting with running for president on the ticket of the Reform Party but blanched when he decided it was too extremist for him to be successful. He clearly grasped that it was in his political interest to distance himself from Duke’s toxicity, but he’s never been aggressively challenged to explain why Duke would have endorsed him in the first place.
“Some Very Fine People on Both Sides”
In 2017, Duke was one of the star attendees of that infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that brought together hundreds of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, and far-right extremists from around the nation. The gathering, which turned violent, leading to the murder of protester Heather Heyer and injuries to many others, was initially called to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Trump also opposed that statue’s removal. After Heyer’s murder by a white nationalist in a car, he was forced to make a statement in which he voiced distinctly contradictory views, both condemning and praising the extremists. The president famously denounced the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” and added that “you also had some very fine people on both sides.” By creating such a false equivalency, he clearly meant to assuage those in his base who also didn’t want monuments and memorials to Confederates removed.
Duke was thrilled by Trump’s initial statements. He said that the president “was the only person in the entirety of the U.S. government who pointed out that all the fault was not with the people who came there to defend the Robert E. Lee statue, and those who came to defend the right and heritage of white people.”
Duke also endorsed Trump in 2020 (and will likely do so in 2024). Perhaps predicting Trump’s future fallout with Vice President Mike Pence, and seeing Tucker Carlson for who he truly is, he tweeted, “Trump & Tucker is the only way to stop the commie Bolsheviks! It is the only path to beat them! #TrumpTucker2020.”
Duke did not make a mistake. He took in Trump’s attacks on immigrants (of color) and his view that whites are victimized by racism. He undoubtedly felt all too comfortable with the president’s suggestions that Black-led cities are dirty and dangerous places. While Republicans might dance around or denounce the very idea that they were in any way linked to white supremacists, no less the Klan itself, those groups are all too clear on where they stand in relation to the two parties.
Unfortunately for Trump, the party’s Klan troubles go further than just a rhetorical convergence. In August 2023, special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four counts related to the January 6th insurrection under a series of laws written during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era — specifically, Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which was originally adopted as part of the 1870 Enforcement Act to combat the Klan and other white terrorist organizations. Those laws were put in place to protect the voting rights and civil rights of newly free African Americans including, as Reuters reporter Hassan Kanu noted, “the right to have one’s vote counted,” the very right that Trump and his criminal enterprise sought to deny.
In the end, the KKK did not choose to support Donald Trump because he was a Republican but because they agreed with the ideas that he (and other far-right Republicans) spout. It is finally time to face the rise in the twenty-first century of a new form of white nationalism and its alignment with many leaders of the Republican Party, including Trump.
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Citing Anti-KKK Law, NAACP and Rep. Bennie Thompson Sue Trump and Far-Right Allies Over Capitol Attack
"Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for deliberately inciting and colluding with white supremacists to stage a coup, in his continuing efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters."
Feb 15, 2021
The NAACP, Rep. Bennie Thompson, and a leading civil rights law firm on Tuesday sued former President Donald Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, and right-wing groups for allegedly conspiring to incite last month's deadly attack on the United States Capitol.
"The insurrection was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated, monthslong plan to destroy democracy, to block the results of a fair and democratic election, and to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African-American voters ."
--Derrick Johnson, NAACP
The suit (pdf)--filed by the civil rights group and the law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia--accuses Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers of directly violating the Enforcement Act of 1871 by attempting to prevent Congress from performing its official duties on January 6.
The Reconstruction-era law, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, originally allowed then-President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law, and deploy federal troops to fight KKK terrorism and enforce the 14th Amendment after the Civil War.
The new suit alleges that "on and before January 6, 2021, the defendants... conspired to incite an assembled crowd to march upon and enter the Capitol of the United States for the common purpose of disrupting, by the use of force, intimidation, and threat, the approval by Congress of the count of votes cast by members of the Electoral College as required by Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution."
"In doing so," it states, "the defendants each intended to prevent, and ultimately delayed, members of Congress from discharging their duty commanded by the United States Constitution to approve the results of the Electoral College in order to elect the next president and vice president of the United States."
In addition to Thompson (D-Miss.)--who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee--other lawmakers including Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) are expected to join the suit in the coming days, according to a NAACP statement.
"January 6th was one of the most shameful days in our country's history, and it was instigated by the president himself," Thompson said in a statement. "His gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger. It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier."
"While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the president accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned."
--Rep. Bennie Thompson
"While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the president accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned," added Thompson. "Failure to do so will only invite this type of authoritarianism for the anti-democratic forces on the far right that are so intent on destroying our country."
Despite additional evidence underscoring Trump's failure to act to stop the assault on the Capitol--which left five people dead--only seven Republican senators voted on Saturday to convict the former president for inciting the attack. Trump was impeached by the House a historic second time on January 13.
" Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for deliberately inciting and colluding with white supremacists to stage a coup, in his continuing efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters," said NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson. "The insurrection was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated, monthslong plan to destroy democracy, to block the results of a fair and democratic election, and to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African-American voters who cast valid ballots."
Johnson added that the lawsuit was filed "to protect our democracy and make sure nothing like what happened on January 6th ever happens again."
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Donald Trump: The Mobster-in-Chief
Will the November election be decided in the streets?
Sep 29, 2020
The white mobs didn't care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
It was the prelude to what civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson would ultimately call Red Summer. The "red" referred to the blood that ran in the streets. The "summer" actually referred to the months from April to October 1919, when violence against African Americans peaked in this country.
In reality, though, that Red Summer stretched across six long years, beginning in East St. Louis in 1917 and ending with the destruction of the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. During that time, white mobs killed thousands of Blacks in 26 cities, including Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In 1921, in a slaughter that has been well documented, white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroyed the country's wealthiest African American community ("Black Wall Street," as it was then known), burning down more than 1,000 houses as well as churches, schools, and even a hospital.
During this period of violence, the mobs sometimes cooperated with the authorities. Just as often, however, they ignored the police, even breaking through jail walls with sledgehammers to gain access to Black detainees whom they executed in unspeakable ways. In Tulsa, for example, that campaign of murder and mayhem began only after the local sheriff refused to hand over a Black teenager accused of sexual assault.
Although white America repressed the memories of Red Summer for many decades, that shameful chapter of our history has gained renewed scrutiny in this era of Black Lives Matter. The Tulsa massacre, for instance, features prominently in the recent Watchmen series on HBO and several documentaries are in the works for its centennial anniversary in 2021. Other recent documentaries have chronicled killings that took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I in Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
But memories of that Red Summer are resurfacing for another, more ominous reason.
White mobs have once again moved out of the shadows and into the limelight during this Trump moment. Militia movements and right-wing extremists are starting to turn out in force to intimidate racial justice and anti-Trump demonstrators. Predominantly white and often explicitly racist, these groups now regularly use social media to threaten their adversaries. This election season, they're gearing up to defend their president with an astonishing degree of support from Republican Party regulars.
According to a January 2020 survey by political scientist Larry Bartels, most Republicans believe "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." More than 40% agree that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands." In a recent essay on his survey's findings, Bartels concludes that ethnic antagonism "has a substantial negative effect on Republicans' commitment to democracy."
As the 2020 election nears, that party is also desperately trying to flip the script by using fear of "their mobs" and "Antifa terrorists" to drive its base to the polls. "We have a Marxist mob perpetrate historic levels of violence & disorder in major American cities," tweeted Florida Senator Marco Rubio in response to the Democratic National Convention in August. Not to be outdone, the president promptly said: "I'm the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos."
Of course, this country has no such Marxist mobs. The only real groups of vigilantes with a demonstrated history of violence and the guns to back up their threats congregate on the far right. The white supremacist Atomwaffen Division, for instance, has been linked to at least five killings since 2017. In late May and early June, members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois conducted two ambushes of police officers and security personnel, killing two of them and injuring three more. Over the summer, as far-right organizations spread the meme "All Lives Splatter" around the internet, dozens of right-wingers drove vehicles of every sort into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The prospect of far-right vigilantes or "militias" heading into the streets to contest the results of the November election has even mainstream institutions worried. "Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between January 1 and May 8, 2020," reports the centrist think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If President Trump loses the election, some extremists may use violence because they believe--however incorrectly--that there was fraud or that the election of Democratic candidate Joe Biden will undermine their extremist objectives."
As the violence of Red Summer demonstrated, such acts were once a mainstay of American life. Indeed, the not-so-hidden history of this country has featured periodic explosions of mob violence. Racial justice activists rightly call for the radical reform of police departments. As November approaches, however, uniformed representatives of the state are hardly the only perpetrators of racist violence. Beware the white mobs, militias, and posses that are desperate to establish their own brand of justice.
Mob History
When Donald Trump paints a picture of lawlessness sweeping through the United States, he's effectively accusing the institutions of government of not doing their jobs. In a September 2nd memo, the Trump administration laid out its charges:
"For the past few months, several State and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers of Federal law enforcement assistance."
As president, Donald Trump has refused to take responsibility for anything, not the more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, not the pandemic-induced economic collapse, and certainly not the racial injustices that prompted this summer's wave of protests. Simultaneously above the law and outside it, the president consistently portrays himself as a populist leader who must battle the elite and its "deep state." With conspiracy-tinged tirades about Democrat-run cities failing to enforce the law, he has already symbolically put himself at the head of a mob--for this is just how such groups justified their extra-legal actions throughout our history.
The right-wing racists who currently bear arms in defense of the president are part of a long tradition of Americans resorting to vigilantism when they believe the law is not protecting their interests. Whether it was the displacement and massacre of Native Americans, the horrors that slaveowners inflicted on African Americans, the wave of lynching that followed Reconstruction, the bloodletting of Red Summer around World War I, the murders conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, or even everyday resistance to federal policies like school desegregation, gangs of Americans have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands on behalf of white supremacy.
To be sure, mobs are hardly responsible for all the racist ills of this country. America has always been a place of institutional racism and violence. Slavery, after all, was legal until 1865. The U.S. government and its military did the bulk of the dispossessing of Native Americans. Police departments cooperated early on with the Ku Klux Klan and today's police officers continue to kill a disproportionate number of African Americans. Mobs have eagerly cooperated with state institutions on the basis of shared racism. But they have also stood at the ready to enforce the dictates of white supremacy even when the police and other guardians of order treat everyone equally before the law.
The mob has occupied an unusually prominent place in our history because Americans have cultivated a unique hostility toward the state and its institutions that goes back to the early years of the Republic. As historian Michael Pfeifer notes in his groundbreaking book, The Roots of Rough Justice, the violent libertarianism associated with the American Revolution and the subsequent lack of a strong, centralized state gave rise to mob violence that gathered force before the Civil War. He writes,
"Antebellum advocates of vigilantism in the Midwest, South, and West drew on Anglo-American and American revolutionary traditions of community violence that suggested that citizens might reclaim the functions of government when legal institutions could not provide sufficient protections to persons or their property."
Those mobs didn't necessarily think of themselves as anti-democratic. Rather, they imagined that they were improving on democracy. As Pfeifer points out, many of the vigilante outfits that targeted minorities practiced democratic procedures of a sort. Some adopted bylaws and even elected their own leaders. They held mock trials and votes on what punishments to mete out: hanging or burning alive.
Such mobs functioned both as a parallel military and, to a certain extent, a parallel state.
The two, in fact, went hand in hand. German sociologist Max Weber famously defined the state as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, but that was the German tradition. In the United States, particularly during its first 150 years, the state only aspired to possess such a monopoly.
Instead, a rough form of frontier justice often prevailed. Before and just after the American Revolution, even whites were its targets, but increasingly its victims were people of color. Slave owners, slave patrols, and ad hoc mobs dispensed justice throughout antebellum America and the tradition of "Judge Lynch" continued long after the abolition of slavery. The pushing of the frontier westward involved not only the Army's killing of Native Americans but extrajudicial violence by bands of settlers. Historian Benjamin Madley estimates that the Native population in California declined by more than 80% between 1846 and 1873, with as many as 16,000 killings in 370-plus massacres. This "winning" of the West also involved the widespread lynching of Latinos.
The "Right" to Bear Arms
Mobs were able to dispense frontier justice not only thanks to a strong libertarian tradition and a weak state, but also because of the widespread availability of guns. Coming out of the Civil War, this country developed a distinct gun culture sustained by a surge in firearm production. Gun prices fell and so guns fell into the hands of more and more citizens.
Mobs used firearms in the infamous Draft Riot in New York in 1863, which ended up targeting the city's Black community, and in New Orleans in 1866 when enraged whites attacked a meeting of Republicans determined to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. In their drive westward, settlers favored Winchester rifles with magazines that could fire 15 rounds, giving them a staggering advantage over the people they were displacing. Early gun control laws seldom prevented whites from acquiring firearms because they were mainly designed to keep guns out of the hands of Blacks and other racial minorities.
Even today, widespread gun ownership distinguishes the United States from every other country. Approximately 40% of American households own one or more firearms, a figure that has remained remarkably consistent for the last 50 years. If you look at guns per capita, the United States ranks number one in the world at 120 firearms per 100 civilians. The next country on the list, war-torn Yemen, comes in a distant second with 52 per hundred. With more guns than people within its borders, it's no wonder that the federal government has often struggled to maintain its monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force.
Gun enthusiasts have erroneously enlisted the Constitution to justify this extreme democracy of firepower. To guard against tyrannical federal behavior, the Second Amendment of the Constitution preserved the right of state militias to bear arms. However, organizations like the National Rifle Association have campaigned for years to reinterpret that amendment as giving any individual the right to bear arms.
That has, in turn, provided ammunition for both the "castle doctrine" (the right to use armed force to defend one's own home) and "stand your ground" laws (the right to use force in "self-defense"). Armed extremist groups now imagine themselves as nothing less than the Second Amendment's "well-regulated Militia" with a constitutionally given "right" to own weapons and defend themselves against the federal government (or anyone else they disapprove of).
Improbably enough, for the last four years, the head of the federal government has become one of their chief supporters.
Donald Trump: Leader of the Pack
Long before becoming president, Donald Trump was already acting as if he were the head of a lynch mob. In 1989, he published full-page ads in the New York Times and three other local papers calling for New York City to reinstate the death penalty in response to a brutal gang rape in Central Park. He swore that the city was then "ruled by the law of the streets" and that "muggers and murderers... should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes."
It was language distinctly reminiscent of white mobs bitter about the failure of local law enforcement to execute Blacks accused of crimes. Like many of their predecessors, the accused Black and Latino teenagers were, in the end, found to be quite innocent of the crime. After a long legal struggle, the Central Park Five (as they came to be known) were released from prison. Trump has never apologized for his campaign to kill innocent people.
When he ran for president, he quickly moved beyond mere "law and order" rhetoric. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump deliberately cultivated a following among armed extremists. At a rally in North Carolina, for instance, he warned of what might happen to the Supreme Court if Hillary Clinton were to win.
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," he lamented. Then he added in his typically confused and elliptical manner of speaking: "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know." He was, in other words, suggesting that followers with guns could do something about Clinton's choices by shooting her or her judicial picks.
Throughout that campaign season, he regularly retweeted white supremacist claims and memes. At the time, it was estimated that more than 60% of the accounts he was retweeting had links to white supremacists. At his rallies, he encouraged his supporters to get "rough" with protesters.
As president, he's continued to side with the mob. He infamously refused to denounce neo-Nazis gathering in Charlottesville in August 2017, applauded the armed demonstrators who demanded the reopening of the economy in the pandemic spring of 2020, and defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August.
Trump has stood up for the Confederate flag, Confederate statues, and keeping the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases. In a recent speech denouncing school curricula that teach about slavery and other unsavory aspects of our history, he pledged to erect a statue of a slaveowner in a project he's been promoting--building a National Garden of American Heroes park. The current administration has cultivated direct links to white nationalists through disgraced figures like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, as well as current advisers like Stephen Miller.
In his reelection bid, Trump pointedly held his first pandemic rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he excoriated Democrats who "want to take away your guns through the repeal of your Second Amendment" and "left-wing radicals [who] burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police officers." In a literal whitewashing of history, he made no mention of the White mobs that had looted businesses and destroyed property in that very city in 1921.
Trump's exhortations to his followers over the heads of state and local officials appeal to the mob belief that citizens must reclaim the functions of government, if necessary through force. Right-wing militias explicitly embrace that history. The "Three Percenters," a militia movement that emerged in 2008 after the election of Barack Obama, purports to protect Americans from tyrannical government. Their name derives from the inaccurate belief that only 3% of Americans took up arms to fight the British empire in the eighteenth century.
Of course, three percent of Americans are not now members of such militias and White nationalist movements, but their numbers are on the rise. White nationalist groups increased from 100 in 2017 to 155 in 2019. The several hundred militia groups now in existence probably have a total of 15,000 to 20,000 members, including an increasing number of veterans with combat experience. Far from a homogeneous force, some are focused on patrolling the southern border and targeting the undocumented. Others are obsessed with resisting the federal government, even in a few cases opposing Trump's various power grabs.
West Virginia University professor John Temple argues, in fact, that not all right-wing militias hold extremist views. "I have listened to many hours of 'patriot' conversations that didn't sound all that different from what you would hear during a typical evening on Fox News," he writes. "Many seemed to have joined the cause for social reasons, or because they liked guns, or because they wanted to be part of something they saw as historic and grandiose--not because their views were far more radical than those of typical right-leaning Americans."
This is not exactly reassuring, since the politics of right-leaning, Fox News-watching Americans have grown more extreme. With nearly half of the Republicans surveyed by Larry Bartels prepared to take the law into their own hands, Trump has nearly succeeded in transforming his party into a mob of vigilantes.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the president is a law-and-order candidate. He flourishes in chaos and routinely flouts the law. By siding with right-wing militias and their ilk, he daily undermines the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.
The debate over defunding the police must be seen in this context. In a country awash in guns and grassroots racism, with a major party flirting with mob violence, getting rid of police departments would be akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire of uncontained extremism. Sure, local law enforcement needs major reforms, massive civic oversight, and right-sized budgets. Police departments must be purged of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The Pentagon has to stop supplying the cops with military-grade weaponry.
But remember: the police can be reformed. What was once an all-white force now better reflects America's diversity. The mob, by definition, is not subject to reforms or any oversight whatsoever.
This is no time to permit the return of frontier justice administered by white mobs and a lawless president, especially with a critical election looming. Mob violence has often accompanied elections in the past, with rival factions fighting over the results, as in the street battles of 1874 in New Orleans between Republican integrationists and racist Democrats. Like nineteenth-century Louisiana, the struggle this November is not just about Democrats versus Republicans. It's about the rule of law versus racist vigilantism.
White supremacy is not going to give up its hold on power without a fight. If you thought you'd seen real American carnage in Trump's four years in office, prepare yourself for the chaotic aftermath of the November election. The mob is itching to take the law into its own hands one more time on behalf of its very own mobster-in-chief.
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Hitler's Ideologues: The U.S. Racism that Bore Fruit in Mein Kampf
"If you are a blond, you belong to the best people in the world, but it's all over with you! Your forebears committed the fatal mistake of intermingling with inferior brunettes, and as a result the great qualities of the blond race, which gave the world the highest type of culture, have been sadly undermined and the predominant traits of the brunettes are asserting themselves more and more until their complete triumph is foreshadowed, especially in the United States."
Jul 05, 2020
"If you are a blond, you belong to the best people in the world, but it's all over with you! Your forebears committed the fatal mistake of intermingling with inferior brunettes, and as a result the great qualities of the blond race, which gave the world the highest type of culture, have been sadly undermined and the predominant traits of the brunettes are asserting themselves more and more until their complete triumph is foreshadowed, especially in the United States."
Thus begins an October 22, 1916, New York Times feature article based on the newly published book The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, who "in more scientific language" warns of the end of the blond race at the hands of brown-haired whites and, worse, of those with brown hair and dark skin. According to Grant, the problem of Nordic peoples was that they did not enjoy the cold and preferred the heat and sunny warmth of the south, but were only able to subsist in the tropical regions as owners of the land instead of working it. The inhabitants of India still spoke the Aryan language but their blood had lost the quality of the conqueror. Grant, in one of his more moderate conclusions, discovered that the solution lay in the practices of the past: "No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and the invaders bring their own women with them... It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf States, perhaps, also the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley must be abandoned to Negroes."
The ideas of white racial superiority used to explain and justify modern imperialism were common currency during the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic, generations before Communism became the excuse. In the United States, scientific justifications were necessary in order to keep a large Black population in the place (first as slaves and later as segregated second-class citizens) that supposedly corresponded to them according to the rules of order, civilization, and progress.
Well into the 20th century, the memoranda and reports of various politicians, senators and ambassadors continued that tradition. The Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and later Ambassador to Mexico, Francis White, for decades wrote reports and gave lectures to future diplomats explaining that "With certain exceptions, a general characteristic of most governments of Latin America, especially those in the tropics and having a very small pure white population, is that great dishonesty exists among public officials." For White, Ecuador was a "very backward country" because its population was only "5% pure white, the rest mixed blood or pure Indian." His advice to trainees in 1922 was that if they were assigned a non-white country, they should know that "political stability in these countries is more or less in direct proportion to the percentage of pure white inhabitants."
According to Grant, and according to many others, the white race had survived in Canada, in Argentina, and in Australia thanks to the extermination of the native races. If the superior race does not exterminate the inferior one, the inferior race will triumph. "At the time of the Revolutionary War the settlers in the thirteen Colonies were overwhelmingly Nordic," but by the mid-19th century "the new immigration [...] contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races" from the south of Europe. "These immigrants adopt the language of the [native-born] American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals."
The Passing of the Great Race did not become an instant best-seller, but it did become one of the classics of scientific racism of the 20th century, and one that would resonate easily with white economic elites and aspiring poor alike. Among Grant's avid readers can be counted Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford, the latter a future admirer and collaborator of Adolf Hitler, who had recommended Grant's book to him. The influential daily newspaper The Boston Transcript concluded that every thinking (which is to say, white) person should read it. The book had a big impact on the ruling class and helped define the categories that elected officials used to draft U.S. immigration laws in 1924: the Nordic race located at the top, below them the Jews, Spanish, Italians and Irish and, even farther down, all those of dark complexion. According to Grant, "race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government." And "it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man." Grant does not clarify whether the racists originating from the superior races aren't the inevitable exceptions to the rule, since it is well known that among white people there are also members with acute mental backwardness who, for obvious reasons, do not view themselves that way and are eager to adopt this theory of superiority by association which requires no individual merit.
A few years after its publication, in 1924, on the other side of the Atlantic, a soldier in his prison cell named Adolf Hitler would read Grant's book with great passion and begin to write his Mein Kampf. Hitler saw The Passing of the Great Race as his Bible. When Hitler became the leader of Nazi Germany, his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, would read with the same passion the book Propaganda, by the Jewish American and double nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays. Bernays did not invent "fake news" but he elevated it to a category of science. Unlike his uncle Freud, he would prove he was right when, in 1954, by request of the C.I.A., he managed to make the world believe that the new president of Guatemala was not a democrat but a Communist. As a consequence of this media manipulation, hundreds of thousands of dead would carpet the earth of Guatemala over the next several decades.
The soldier Adolf Hitler did not have radical ideas. Nor was he a radical thinker, quite the contrary: his ideas and his thinking were commonplaces in his time, above all on the other side of the Atlantic. In the United States, the idea of a glorious Teutonic and Aryan race threatened with extinction by the inferior races was standard currency during the 19th century, from the hooded Ku Klux Klan to presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, including Marines and volunteers who hunted Blacks for sport, raped them and justified rape as a way of improving the race on tropical islands. It is very likely that Nazism finds its deepest roots in the southern U.S., long before losing its memory in the Second World War.
Ten years later, the University of California, Berkley zoologist Samuel Jackson Holmes proposed the forced sterilization of Mexicans in the United States (in the same way that 10,000 "idiots" had been sterilized in California alone) in order to address the serious problem represented by the diminishing quality of the nation's racial stock. "The children of the workers of today will be citizens tomorrow," Holmes asserted. In successive articles, he repeated the warning made by Theodore Roosevelt about "racial suicide" that would resonate not only with members of the Ku Klux Klan but with a broad swath of Anglo-Saxon citizens, a warning that would result, during the Great Depression, in the persecution of Mexicans and in the deportation of a half-million U.S. citizens with a mixed-race appearance.
Translated by Dr. Bruce Campell, Saint John's University
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