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Into the Abyss
The day after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston, South Carolina, church with a gun and killed nine black people because they were black.
It was purely a coincidence that one act followed the other, hundreds of miles apart: Roof apparently knew little about Trump and was not known to be a Trump follower. Trump had never met nor had any interaction with Roof.
Yet the two acts were inextricably connectedâby the events and acts that had preceded them, and by those that followed in the ensuing weeks and months. Most of all, both acts signaled, in different ways, a deep change in the American cultural and political landscape.
The American radical rightâthe violent, paranoid, racist, hateful radical rightâwas back with a vengeance. Actually, it had never really gone away. And now it had a presidential candidate.
Hopefully, heâs going to sit there and say, âWhen I become elected president, what weâre going to do is weâre going to make the border a vacation spot, itâs going to cost you twenty-five dollars for a permit, and then you get fifty dollars for every confirmed kill.â Thatâd be one nice thing.
âSupporter of Donald Trump, interviewed in the New York Times
This robocall goes out to all millennials and others who are honest in all their dealings ⊠The white race is being replaced by other peoples in America and in all white countries. Donald Trump stands strong as a nationalist.
âWilliam White (a white nationalist), pro-Trump robocall to Massachusetts voters
The march to victory will not be won by Donald Trump in 2016, but this could be the steppingstone we need to then radicalize millions of White working and middle class families to the call to truly begin a struggle for Faith, family and folk.
âMatthew Heimbach, cofounder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Youth Network, at organizationâs website
Get all of these monkeys the hell out of our countryânow! Heil Donald TrumpâTHE ULTIMATE SAVIOR.
âTweet from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website
Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.
âWhite man in Boston who with another man beat a homeless Latino to within an inch of his life with a metal pole and then urinated on him
People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.
âDonald Trump, when asked about the Boston hate crime
Most Americans surveying the wreckage of the American political landscape in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election are startled by the ugliness and violence that have crept into the nationâs electoral politics. And they can recognize its source: the sudden appearance of the racist far right as players.
Almost as blindingly as Donald Trump appeared on the scene, so did an array of white nationalists and supremacists, conspiracy theorists and xenophobes, even Klansmen and skinheads and other violent radicals, who for decades had been relegated to the fringe of right-wing politics. Hadnât they gone extinct?
Most Americans did not realize that, far from going extinct, these groups had been growing and flourishing in recent years, fed by the rivulets of hate mongering and disinformation-fueled propaganda flowing out of right-wing media for at least a decade and the hospitable dark environment provided by a virtual blackout in mainstream media concerning the growth of right-wing extremism.
These tendencies dated back to the Bill Clinton administration, when the radical right first began to try to mainstream itself as a âpatriotâ and militia movement, but was derailed largely by the violent terrorism that the movement also brewed up. Simultaneously, right-wing media began appearing as a new propaganda type that openly eschewed the journalistic standards of mainstream news organizations: in a classic use of âNewspeak,â they declared themselves âfair and balanced.â
The organizational drive of the new âPatriotâ movement largely went into a hiatus in the early part of the new century, during the conservative Republican administration of George W. Bush, but the extremism that originally fueled the movement in the 1990s remained very much alive. On the far right the conspiracist element found fresh life in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which produced an entire cottage industry devoted to proving that the attacks were part of a plot by the New World Order. Simultaneously, the mainstream rhetoric on the right became vociferous during the Iraq War, when any criticism of Bush and his administrationâs conduct of the war was denounced nastily as treason, and liberals were sneered at as âsoft on terror.â
This suffused extremism came roaring back to life with the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Partyâs candidate for the presidency in 2008, and then his election, which sparked a virulent counterreaction on the radical right. The idea of a black man, let alone a liberal one, as president made them recoil in visceral disgust. The mainstream, business-establishment rightâafter years of right-wing-media conditioning during both the Clinton and Bush yearsâapparently could no longer abide the idea of shared rule with a liberal president and set out to delegitimize him by any means possible. And it was in that shared hatred that the extremist and mainstream right finally cemented their growing alliance.
This alliance found form in the âTea Party,â which was widely celebrated as a grassroots conservative phenomenon that sprang to life in 2009, in the wake of Obamaâs election. It was generally portrayed (following membersâ self-descriptions) as attached to the conservative ideal of small government, expressed as limited spending and taxes. In reality, however, their founding organizations were explicitly focused on opposing Obama and every aspect of his presidency. In the ensuing years, politicians and pundits inside the Beltway assumed that this was the Tea Partyâs raison dâĂȘtre.
But it was more. In the rural and red-voting suburban districts where the Tea Party organized itself on the ground, it became the living embodiment of right-wing populism.
Right-wing populism in Americaâas distinct from its left-wing varietyâhas always been predicated on a narrative known as âproducerism,â in which the hard-working âproducersâ of America are beset by a two-headed enemy: a nefarious elite suppressing them from above, and a parasitic underclass of âothers,â reliant on welfare and government benefits, tearing them down and sucking them under from below. Right-wing populism has most often been expressed via various nativist anti-immigrant movements. In the twenty-first century, this brand of populism became expressed as a hostility to âliberalâ elites and âparasiticâ minorities and immigrants.
Thus, the Tea Party focused on conspiracy theories and the supposed âtyrannyâ of the president, and ardently embraced ideals that kept bubbling up from the extremist right: constitutionalism, nullification of federal laws and edicts, and even secession from the Union. The Tea Party movement became a major conduit into the mainstream of American conservatism of the most extreme, often outright nutty ideas that originated with the Patriot movement and its related far-right cousins.
The Patriots have always specialized in creating a kind of alternative universe, a set of alternate explanations for an entire world of known facts, made possible only by a willingness to believe in easily disprovable falsehoods. The Patriots describe themselves primarily as constitutionalists, but their understanding of the Constitution is based on a distorted misreading of the document and its place in the body of law. For example, Patriots believe that the Second Amendment prohibits all gun and arms regulation whatsoever; that the text of the Constitution prohibits the federal government from owning any kind of public lands and from creating any kind of federal law enforcement; that the sheriff of the county is the highest law-enforcement entity in the land; and that federal laws ensuring civil rights and prohibiting hate crimes are unconstitutional and thus moot. Thus, in the context of the Patriot movement, âconstitutionalistâ describes people who believe that most âconstitutionalâ powers reside in local government, specifically county sheriffsânot in the national Constitution.
These beliefs about the Constitution are amplified by a panoply of conspiracy theories: A nefarious New World Order is plotting to enslave all of mankind in a world government that permits no freedom, and its many tentacles can be glimpsed daily in news events. President Obama is secretly an illegitimate president who was born overseas and falsified his birth certificate; heâs also secretly a Muslim plotting to hand the United States over to Islamist radicals who plan to institute sharia law in the United States and around the world. Global warming is a hoax, a scam dreamed up by leftists and totalitarian environmentalists who want to control every facet of our lives. In this alternative universe, facts and the laws of political gravity do not apply.
In the alternative universe of right-wing populism, down is often up. Ultimately, the right-wing populist solution to the worldâs problems is to submit to an authoritarian âenlightenedâ ruler. Some of the leading figures of right-wing populist movements in American historyâfor example, Henry Fordâhave been famous âcaptains of industry.â
Early on, Donald Trump identified this belief system as being aligned with his own. âI think the people of the Tea Party like me, because I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party,â he told a Fox News interviewer in 2011.
Trump was cannily tapping into a large voting bloc that had already been created by conservative activists and made large by the very rhetoric and ideology that nearly all of the movementâs media organs embraced to some degree before his arrival on the scene.
The political establishment, however, has studiously ignored the existence of this bloc, and so it has been utterly befuddled by the Trump phenomenon and his ability to operate in this universe where the normal laws of reason do not seem to apply and to bring it onto the national political stage.
âHe is defying the laws of political gravity right now,â exclaimed the political consultant Michael Bronstein in January 2016, voicing what became the conventional wisdom. Regarding Trumpâs comments and tweets, Bronstein said, âInside the presidential race, any one of these lines, if they were associated to another candidate, it wouldâve ended the candidacy ⊠I think the establishment, the punditry class, looks at him and a lot of them are just bewildered.â
Before the Trump campaign, the true believers of the Tea Party were assumed to be on the fringe of the Republican Party, a tiny subset that had no voice and even less power. The Trump campaign revealed that their numbers were not tiny, nor were they powerless. These dark forces had been building for years, waiting for the right kind of figureâcharismatic, rich, fearlessly bombasticâto come along and put them into play.
They manifested themselves on that very first day of Trumpâs campaign, June 15, 2015, at the press conference he called at Trump Tower, in New York City. The atmospherics were negative: Trump was boastful and blaming as he sketched a narrative of an America whose leadersâ incompetence had allowed the nation to be beaten down in trade by foreigners. But what really stood out was his open, unapologetic expression of bigotry toward Latinos and other minorities.
âThe US has become a dumping ground for everybody elseâs problems,â he claimed, to loud applause, and then continued:
Thank you. Itâs true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, theyâre not sending their best. Theyâre not sending you ⊠Theyâre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyâre bringing those problems with us. Theyâre bringing drugs. Theyâre bringing crime. Theyâre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what weâre getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. Theyâre sending us not the right people.
Itâs coming from more than Mexico. Itâs coming from all over South and Latin America, and itâs coming probablyâprobablyâfrom the Middle East. But we donât know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we donât know whatâs happening. And itâs got to stop and itâs got to stop fast.
This was a signature trope of Trumpâs campaign: Trump didnât avail himself of the coded âdog whistleâ signals that conservatives had learned to employ when they spoke about race, ethnicity, crime, and immigration. He called this kind of euphemistic prevarication âpolitical correctness,â and he intended to smash it to tiny pieces and say what he knew his listeners already thought.
Right-wing politicians had for years relied on this coy rhetoric because naked racial attacks hurt them in opinion polls. This rhetorical dancing around also spared them from being attacked for their racism while allowing them to communicate to their own audiences that their biases aligned with those of their white suburban and rural baseâwhich, it emerged, continued to embrace racist tropes and stereotypes about people of color, regardless of the broader social stigma in doing so.
This was made manifestly clear by the ardent following that Trump immediately developed for his âanti-PCâ style of campaigning: instead of plummeting in the polls, as many expected after Trumpâs wildly controversial opening speech, his approval ratings climbed. And climbed. And climbed.
Longtime nativists soon perceived in Trump a bandwagon they could jump on. Among the friends and admirers Trump acquired who were movement conservatives was one of their leading mavens, the syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. Coulter had long complained that immigration was an issue that Republicans kept overlooking and botching in national electionsâbecause they hadnât gone far enough to the right.
In fact, Coulter had made that very argument in a book that came out on June 1, 2015, Adios America: The Leftâs Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. She had been making the rounds of all the right-wing TV talk shows to promote itâand a few mainstream programs as well.
Coulter has a long history of citing far-right extremists and white nationalists in her work, and this one was no different. Retailing a hodgepodge of recycled nativist talking points, the book cited a number of white supremacist sources, and repeated the assertion of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, that âimmigration is a proxy war against America.â She also claimed in the book that Latinos sustained a âculture of misogyny.â
Coulter also credited another well-known white nationalist figure named Peter Brimelowâthe founder of an openly racist website called VDare (named for Virginia Dare, the first white child born in North America)âfor her anti-immigrant politics. These views were seconded by another well-known âacademic racist,â Jared Taylor, who declared that with her book Coulter âhas established herself as the foremost advocate for immigration sanity in Americaâif not the world.â
Meanwhile, on TV and elsewhere, Coulter did what she does bestâserve up sound bites of outrageous commentary that stir up condemnation from mainstream liberals and that warm the hearts of her fellow conservatives. This time out, though, Coulter had grown beyond outrageous and become genuinely vicious, warning Americans they âbetter get used to having your little girls get rapedâ as a result of immigration and that âAmericans should fear immigrants more than ISIS,â and sneering that Mexican culture âis obviously deficient.â She denied that there was anything bigoted about this: âHispanics are not black,â she countered, âso drop the racism crap.â
Coulter, who had been an ardent Romney supporter, had begun to turn in Trumpâs direction, telling one interviewer that a Trump-Romney ticket would stop âforeignersâ from outvoting âwhite Americans.â It was apparently a mutual-admiration society: Coulter told a reporter that Trump had âasked for, and received, an advance copy of my book, and he told me ⊠that heâs read the book cover to cover.â Trump tweeted out that Coulterâs book was âa great read. Good job!â
One of the solutions to immigration from south of the border was to build an effective wall along the Mexican border. âContrary to repeated assertions that fences donât work,â Coulter asserted, â⊠after Israel completed a fence along its border in 2013, the number of illegal aliens entering the country dropped to zero.â
When Trump announced his plans to run for president on June 15, he made the wall idea the centerpiece of his attack on Mexican immigration: âI would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and Iâll build them very inexpensivel...