#maga-racists — Public Fediverse posts

J6 was about racism and white fear of losing privilege.

"If a significant segment of the populace goes unchallenged in rooting its identity in myths of the immaculacy of whiteness, and is willing to preserve that identity through violent acts, we perpetuate the lie—and the violence."

American Myths Are Made of White Grievance—and the Jan. 6 Big Lie Is Just the Latest https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/01/trump-jan-january-6-insurrection-big-lie-white-supremacy-confederate/

#WhiteSupremacists
#MAGARacists
#WhiteFear

"Robert Pape...and his “little army of researchers” have analyzed 890 insurrectionists and the 439 counties in 47 states from which they came. The rioters were 92 percent white and 86 percent male. Only 14 percent had extremist ties. They were far less likely to be unemployed or have a criminal record than right-wing protesters arrested earlier in the Trump era. They were also older, mostly in their 40s and 50s. But what especially jumped out to Pape and his colleagues was that more than half were from counties that Joe Biden won. The more rural a county was, and the more its voters favored Trump over Biden, the less likely it was to produce an insurrectionist.

There was another striking common denominator: The more a county’s white population declined, percentage wise, the more likely it was to send a would-be rioter to the Capitol. “Race is the primary factor,” Pape says, accounting for “as much as 75 percent of the energy underneath the insurrectionist movement.” It’s not that the rioters were duped by Trump, but that his lies found fertile ground amid their fears. “The word ‘disinformation’ is off,” Pape says. “It’s about demographic change and whether you’re afraid of it or not.”

Pape’s team conducted two national surveys, which suggested that 21 million Americans—8 percent of the body politic—believe that Biden stole the election and that violence would be justified to restore Trump to power. They identified two key conspiracies undergirding these dual beliefs: Nearly half the people who hold them are convinced there is a “secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” running the country. And a whopping three-quarters believe in the so-called great replacement, the idea that white Americans are being supplanted by people of color.

...white grievance was the primary motivator. “There’s a clear racial cleavage that you see in our data, and that is what is also captured in the ‘great replacement theory.’”

To believe that whiteness is on the decline is to accept what Theodore W. Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race, calls the Great White Assumption: “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” This assumption is what allows the media to discuss a point of paranoia-fueled Klan dogma—that whiteness is a thing to be protected and Blackness a thing to be negated—as a “theory.”

Such distinctions—between reality and the stories we tell ourselves— matter a great deal. Because to counter not only Trump’s lies but also the reasons they resonate—the lies within the lies—we must understand what it is we’re facing. Otherwise we miss opportunities to transform the systems that uphold America’s story by means of fiction instead of truth. As Pape puts it, the insurrectionists “are motivated by what they see as their interest to believe the lie…They’re developing this understanding of their interests where race is at the center of it.”

“This isn’t just about disinformation as magical thinking,” he adds. “There’s a conservative set of beliefs here.”

Indeed, narratives of whiteness under threat are conservative talking points as old as the Civil War.
...
It would do history a disservice if we were to portray the insurrectionists as race-neutral victims of Trump’s swindle rather than what they are: junior partners of white supremacy.

“If you keep missing the big thing that’s going on, you’re never going to be able to deal with it,” Pape says. “There’s a good reason why we’re not making much progress, and it’s because we’ve been captivated by this idea” that the rioters were under the spell of Trump’s lies.

America remains menaced by our collective lack of honest self-­reflection. If a significant segment of the populace goes unchallenged in rooting its identity in myths of the immaculacy of whiteness, and is willing to preserve that identity through violent acts, we perpetuate the lie—and the violence. If present-day domestic threats cannot move our society to confront itself, perhaps remembering those from the past might."