America’s Failure to Deal with the White Power Movement Should Set off Alarm Bells
By Kathleen Belew
Oct. 2,
2020
When asked
to condemn “white supremacists and militia groups” during his debate with Joe
Biden this week, President Trump gave a largely garbled answer, asking for
definitions and caveats, attempting to misdirect attention to leftist violence,
and repeatedly interrupting the moderator. One part of his answer, however, was
crystal clear. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Mr. Trump said.
A
member of the Proud Boys confronts a counterprotester at a rally in Portland.
Photograph: John Locher/AP
-----
Rather than
condemn white power groups, Mr. Trump instead issued an unambiguous call to
them to be ready.
Watchdog
groups and analysts have debated about how to classify the Proud Boys. Its
members explicitly disavow white supremacy in a bid for respectability, but its
ideology is clearly white supremacist: Photographs of members flashing the
white power sign, the presence of members at white power events and at rallies
and expert analyses of the group’s online content make this clear.
They should
be seen as fellow travellers with white power groups and activists. Names and
tactics vary, but the white power movement is united in ideology and intent.
Its adherents include propagandists calling for the end of non-European
immigration, those who carry out attacks mislabelled “lone wolf” violence in
places like El Paso, Pittsburgh, Charleston, S.C., and Christchurch, New
Zealand, and groups that train secretly for war, like the Base, and even for
nuclear war, like Atomwaffen Division.
It also
includes members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups, and
large segments of the Boogaloo Boys and extra-legal militias. This is why it is
a mistake to understand Mr. Trump’s statement as directed solely to the Proud
Boys — which had, before the night was over, incorporated “Stand Back, Stand
By” into a badge logo. Other groups aligned with the white power movement will
certainly interpret Mr. Trump’s message as including them. This complex web has
worked exactly this way since the late 1970s, with disastrous results.
The white
power movement is, in many ways, an incredibly diverse array of activists. I
found in my research that though it is a fringe movement, its supporters represent
a cross-section of American life: rich and poor and middle class; religious
leaders and felons; men and women and children; people in cities and suburbs
and rural areas.
What binds
these disparate groups is that they espouse the violent defence of white
supremacy. They see the white race as under attack — from immigration, from the
rise of the non-white population, and from the acceptance of multiculturalism
by much of the nation.
For them,
defending the white race and white culture from these forces requires a violent
attempt to stop the country’s demographic changes. Some of them wish to provoke
race war, overthrowing the nation itself. Others simply wish to attack
immigrants and keep people of colour from voting.
Before the
debate, this attack on democracy itself was not fully clear to me, not even
after a decade researching the earlier white power movement and several years
watching its resurgence after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Va. This movement declared war on the state, and especially
the federal government, in 1983. It then embarked upon a series of violent
acts, most notoriously the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.
But there
is something new today: The president and his administration are at war on the
democratic process, as we see in his weakening of the Post Office and the
credibility of mail-in ballots, in calls for “poll watchers” that are clear
invitations for intimidation, and in statements by Mr. Trump that cast doubt on
his willingness to accept the results of the election.
Not only
does “Stand back and stand by” fail to denounce and disavow white supremacist
violence, it seems to be a call to arms and preparedness. It suggests that
these groups, who are eager to do violence in any case, have the implicit
approval of the state.
The day
after the debate, Mr. Trump claimed not to know who the Proud Boys were, and
told them to “stand down.” But even the most generous interpretation of his
comments does not release Mr. Trump from accountability. The Proud Boys — some
of whom were involved in the Charlottesville rally — should be well known to
the president. And no matter what he says now, he can’t unring the bell.
The groups
Mr. Trump declined to disavow will interpret attempts to clarify to be merely
strategic denials. He did not, in his initial statement, specify a moment for
which the Proud Boys ought to “stand by.” But if Mr. Trump loses, they will
surely move from “stand by” to “engage,” prepared to take violent action. If
Mr. Trump wins, they will likely believe that they are an unofficial apparatus
of state violence.
Because of
my research on the white power movement’s history, I regularly hear from people
sounding the alarm. They are advocates who try to de-radicalise those
attempting to leave white power groups. They are watchdogs that monitor white
power internet activism. They are people at tech companies charged with
flagging hate speech, and who are exhausted by the sheer magnitude of the task
and the hatefulness they encounter.
They are
teachers and librarians and parents worried about what to do when they meet
young people headed down the road to violence. And they are even people who
have worked in the Trump administration, people in his own Department of Homeland
Security and F.B.I., who have repeatedly identified white power as the most
prominent source of domestic terrorism. Whistle-blowers like Elizabeth Neumann
and Brian Murphy at the Department of Homeland Security have been warning of
insufficient resources and will to confront this problem at the highest levels
of the Trump administration.
Many of
these people predict increasing violence from now through the election, and
after, regardless of winner. The white power movement has long sought not only
to intimidate voters — which it has done — but also to inflict mass casualties.
There is no reason to think that strategy will change.
We are
talking about a resurgence of the movement responsible for the Oklahoma City
bombing, the largest deliberate mass killing on American soil between Pearl
Harbour and the Sept. 11 attacks. The fact that most people don’t remember the
Oklahoma bombing as the work of a movement reveals how deeply entrenched the
white power movement is as an American problem.
This is a
movement that has been using online social network activism since 1983, that
has repeatedly targeted people and infrastructure, that has not been
effectively confronted. As I found in the extensive archives of the white power
movement, we have not allocated sufficient resources to surveil and stop white
power violence.
Criminal
trials of its activists have often failed. Piecemeal responses to the
coordinated recruitment of active-duty military personnel and other groups with
similar expertise have not sufficiently stopped the flow of weapons, tactics,
and training to these groups.
We are
decades, if not generations, into this problem. A call to arms like “stand back
and stand by” is nothing less than catastrophic.
----
Kathleen Belew is an assistant professor of history
at the University of Chicago and the author of “Bring the War Home: The White
Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
Original Headline: Why ‘Stand Back and Stand By’ Should Set Off
Alarm Bells
Source: The New York Times
New
Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism