This is a pretty good article and I recommend actually going over there and reading it in full and understanding it, because this is a trend that is NOT going away.
As a society, I think we’ve gotten to the point where we can wrap our heads around the existence of female anti-feminists, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet for people of color who are open white supremacists! We need to stop wasting our time saying “omg I can’t believe it’s happening” so we can start fighting it. It’s really always been there—it’s just become more visible now.
Here are some of the simple reasons why this is happening/has happened/will keep happening.
Organized white supremacists are very skilled at racial manipulation and triangulation. Over the last century, they’ve field-tested ways of setting any minority against any other minority.
Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are embedded in right wing politics as much as racism is, and for some individuals they’re more motivating than racism. They’d rather live in a social world where their race/ethnicity is hated but they also get their own license to hate who they want to hate.
There are many things that can be done at the cultural level to keep young men of color from falling into this bullshit. The most effective intervention is other young men of color standing up and arguing them down.
Brazil was a safe haven for confederates after the war.
I wonder what all those “heritage not hate” people are going to say to these people are replacing the swastika with a confederate flag. Kinda turns that myth upside down huh.
The fact that the mail bomber had his house improperly foreclosed on by the company of Steve Mnuchin, then-banker and now-Trump’s Secretary of Treasury, is such a perfect encapsulation of how right-wing populism works. You provide cover for one segment of elites by scapegoating marginalized people and a competing segment of elites, who you claim are in cahoots with one another.
Right-wing populism a powerful enough ideological tool that you can literally get someone to join a cult of personality around a man even as he empowers someone who directly harmed them, simply by acknowledging the potential for the redirection of raw anger. The Trump administration literally, personally damaged the bomber’s life, but he likely never even knew it, never even knew that the man behind his foreclosure was now working with the man he idolized. Following the foreclosure, he was probably just angry at the prevailing system, but his anger had no structure, no ideology (it seems he wasn’t even politically active before 2016). In absence of a popular leftist systemic critique, the hard right was able to monopolize the response to anger among many white people, redirect it, and mold it in the shape of producerism. Rather than being led to realize the way the construction of power in society actually functions to disadvantage him along the lines of class while keeping him invested in the system with compensatory privileges along lines of race, gender, etc. (see Du Bois’ “wages of whiteness” argument [pg. 700-701 here]), he instead was led to follow the fraudulent right-wing alternative: that corrupt liberal elites were using their power to ruin his life through their promotion of “globalism,” multiculturalism, cronyism, etc.
Things like this always make me think back to an anecdote from Chip Berlet’s extremely insightful “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort”:
Posse [Commitatus] and [Christian] Identity organizers capitalized on the farm crisis of the 1980s. Rural America faced its worst economic slump in half a century, owing largely to unfair and inequitable policies by the federal government and private banks. While most of society ignored angry and desperate rural families’ legitimate grievances, far-right activists urged resistance and offered ready scapegoats, namely, the Jews who supposedly controlled the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. In the early 1980’s, Posse activists helped to split the influential American Agricultural Movement, while Identity theology and antisemitic conspiracy theories gained an alarming level of acceptance in rural America. One poll in 1985 found that in the farm belt 27 percent of respondents felt that ‘international Jewish bankers’ were responsible for the farm crisis.
Right-wing populism is an ideological mechanism which mobilizes people who are are wronged by elites to fight in defense of certain factions of elites rather than against the system of elites as a whole by redirecting their anger towards scapegoats who are perceived to threaten privileges that they hold along other dimensions than the one they were wronged on.
Guys, please please please keep Brazil in your prayers and keep an eye on us.
Today we had the elections and the candidate who’s winning is extremely sexist, homophobic, white supremacist that supports dictatorships and that everything should be solved with guns (he’s also a former member of military).
He has said that women aren’t fit to work bc they can get pregnant, that the reason he had a female child was because he was “weak” when making the baby, that “gayness” is a product of parents not beating their children enough, that the biggest mistake of the horrible dictatorship our country lived in the 60’s was torturing instead of killing, etc.
So far, his hateful speeches have sparked a massive hateful following of people who idolize him and there have been numerous cases of these people doing terrible things in his name. For instance, groups of people chanting on the streets that he will kill gays (a slur was used), people taking pictures using guns in the voting cabin, hacking a fb group of women against this man, his supporters shot and killed a dog for “disrupting” their event and more.
The mainly white male following has spread inummerous fake news about other candidates and are convinced that nazism was a leftist movement and use this info to demonize the main contender, who’s a leftist. This caused the german embassy to release a statement informing them that it was (obviously) actually a right wing movement. Not surprisingly, as radical right wingers, they do not believe it. That, coupled with his VP talk of “race whitening” doesn’t shock anyone here.
The elections will soon be over and he’s winning with a 20% gap. I am completely desolate. I don’t know what to do, how life’s gonna be for me and my friends. I’ve never been more scared in my life. My country is recognized all over the world for its freedom, but we’re about to enter very very dark times.
Please, don’t forget us.
He has now won the election.
Yesterday a black boy my age was killed in a protest and today people are celebrating this “win” setting fireworks on the streets.
Western Europe’s weird “we all learned our lesson after 1945 and now we’re all nice progressives who don’t do icky things like racism and sexism anymore 😇” superiority complex is straight up one of the biggest enablers of the rise of the militant far right here
Also the rightwing directly exploits this complex to recruit people who don’t consider themselves nationalist, or even racist. How many times do you see shit like “Immigrants and refugees are bad because they’re misogynist, they’re antisemitic, they’re homophobic!! And we’re not, because we’re too nice for those things, but the only way to protect our progressiveness is to keep them out so they don’t bring all that bad stuff back!!” or “We give these people all this equality and opportunities and they’re still fucked up and poor! What the fuck is wrong with those people!?”
FAIR has deep influence in the Trump administration. As Gomez was allegedly reprimanded for pointing out, former FAIR executive director Julie Kirchner was an advisor to the Trump campaign. She is now the Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman within the Department of Homeland Security. John Zadrozny, another ex-FAIR employee, worked on the White House Domestic Policy Council and is now with the State Department. Ian Smith, formerly employed with FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, has just resigned his position at Homeland Security. Leaked emails, obtained and shared by the Atlantic, appeared to tie him to white nationalists Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor.
The owners of Britain’s largest socialist bookshop, Bookmarks, have said
the store was attacked by far-right protesters wearing masks who
wrecked displays and ripped up books and magazines. Staff were closing the shop on Bloomsbury Street in central London on Saturday evening when about a dozen people descended on it.
Some of the attackers carried placards reading “British
Bolshevik Cult” and one of those involved wore a Donald Trump mask. A far-right protest against censorship of the conspiracy theory
website Infowars took place in central London on Saturday at which
protesters were seen with the same placards. Others wore “Make Britain
Great Again” caps.
Michael Bradley, from Stand up to Racism, said: “Luckily no one was
hurt this time, but this is a sinister development that indicates the
growing confidence of the far right who feel they can attack a bookshop
in central London in broad daylight.
“Attacking a bookshop also exposes their claims to be defenders of free speech as hollow.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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