"Undercover With the New Alt-Right," by Amanda Moore in The Nation

Journalist Amanda Moore went undercover for 11 months and demonstrated her point that the extremism that's playing out currently in our country is more dangerous than the press has fully grasped. That said, in days of late, I am hearing more mainstream news media specifically using the word "fascism" to describe Donald Trump and his followers. Yes, long overdue. 

For example, Joe Scarborough in Morning Joe recently said, "It's way too late to call this fascism." Absolutely. It's a good thing to call this out as it's leading to the rise of violence in our country, against Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and U.S. minorities.

Amanda's story is riveting and illuminating of not only the expansiveness of this far-right ecosystem, but also an animated youth movement within doing all they can to infiltrate, and ultimately take over, the GOP. 

I appreciate Amanda's work in Texas where she identifies a link between anti-Semitic white supremacist holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and an anti-immigrant group, Texans for Strong Borders, that as previously posted to this blog. is entangled with Texas Republican Party leadership and GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi himself. These dynamics have fostered a serious divide within the Texas Republican Party that you can learn about in this October 9th Texas Tribune piece by Robert Downen titled, Conservative PAC leader’s meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes leads to condemnations, escalates GOP infighting.

These are troubling times in our state and nation, no less.

-Angela Valenzuela

AUGUST 22, 2023 | The Nation

 Undercover With the New Alt-Right

For 11 months, I pretended to be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying to infiltrate the Republican Party.

AMANDA MOORE

Going to a Proud Boys riot with a neo-Nazi is not something I ever expected to do. But in August 2021, I found myself driving through downtown Portland, Ore., with an avowed white supremacist named Alex Nelson. We were on our way to the abandoned K-Mart parking lot that the Proud Boys had commandeered for their “Summer of Love” rally. The event marked the one-year anniversary of a “Back the Blue” demonstration that had become a brawl between the Proud Boys and militias on one side and anti-fascist counterprotesters on the other.

Earlier that week, Nelson, a man in his late 20s who was fond of discussing his “Anglo heritage,” had invited me to join him to watch what he assumed would be violent clashes. “Portland has canceled all parades and markets for the past year and a half. This is the only culture in Portland now. There will probably be a thousand spectators or more lining the bridges and sidewalks,” he assured me.

By then, I had been undercover with the far right for nine months, motivated by my belief that the fascist threat to the country was misunderstood by much of the press and far more dangerous than what was being reported. At first, I had planned only to sell the audio from “Stop the Steal” rallies to a podcast and write a couple of blog posts. But I found myself wanting to get a behind-the-scenes look at the far-right movement—to go to events from which the press was barred and observe extremists when they felt they were in their “safe space”—so the project grew into something far bigger: a long-term infiltration of the network of young white nationalists in America.As we cruised the city, Nelson said, “The people who go to that parking lot, they’re highly violent, unhinged, very angry older Gen X or boomers. You can’t just show up—they have to know you. And they don’t know anyone under the age of 35.”

By contrast, he added, last night he had been to an Oregon Young Republicans meeting that was “full of normal, healthy, attractive young people.” As we pulled up to a red light, Nelson looked over at me and smirked. “But none of those people are going to be in the K-Mart parking lot.”

People in the political center and on the left tend to have a monolithic view of the far right. In reality, it is an expansive ecosystem that includes neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists, anti-government militias, and white nationalists. These groups have some beliefs that conflict, but they are generally willing to overlook their differences. Still, not every group uses the same tactics to try to gain power.

Connecting the dots: CPAC, AFPAC, Christianity, and how Vladimir Putin is now a "Far-Right Savior"

Trump's stoking white nationalist fears into his supporters' lives and bodies over the trumped-up lie that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is something to be feared even unto the point of death is not just hyperbolic, but also garish and profoundly offensive (i.e., "Trump calls on supporters to 'lay down their very lives' to defend US against Critical Race Theory").

That said, his shrill screams against that which he believes interrupts whiteness —as if white supremacy should not get interrupted—nevertheless thoroughly rhymes with the piece below on Putin's appeal to the extreme right in the U.S. 

We would all do well to not dismiss these characters as a "fringe group" when what they're normalizing is white supremacy within the Republican party, as a whole.

Rather their angry, defensive, off-putting white nationalist vibe found a home with otherwise similarly fear-mongering, "stop-the-steal" republicans attending this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event, including Josh Mandel (R), Candidate for the Senate from Ohio; Congressman Jim Banks (R) Indiana; Josh Hawley (R) Missouri; and Gov. Kristi Noam (R) South Dakota that you can read about in this Rolling Stones piece titled, "White Nationalists Raid CPAC But Find Themselves Right at Home."

CPAC ran adjacently to America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) held in Orlando, Florida organized by white supremacist, anti-Semitic Nick Fuentes who expresses with glee on his face that the "secret sauce here is our young, white men" who then, at Fuentes' behest, loudly applaud Russia for their actions followed by jeers for Putin, all of which you can see and hear for yourselves here. In attendance were Congressman Paul Gosar, (R) Arizona; and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) Georgia, legitimating such extremism. 

The word, "fringe," clearly loses its meaning in a context where the authoritarian, strong-man, by-any-means-necessary, version of history is the preferred one. Read here from this piece below what the offspring is of this kind of thinking:

"Burghart says some extremist rightwing militias even see Ukraine as a potential scenario to discuss how to prepare for urban warfare and a future insurgency in the US itself. Instead of horror at the outbreak of brutal urban warfare, some US extremists are obsessed with the idea of a coming civil war in America.

“They see a societal collapse and need to prepare for an impending civil war, and their focus is on preparing for the battles of that here in the US,” Burgheart added."

What makes this also a Christian ideological agenda is how extremist thought conflates with some interpretations of the book of Revelation that point to Armageddon and end times such that supporting Putin is not only ideologically resonant, but a hastening of the apocalypse. For example, read "Religious Views of Some Extremists May Fuel More Violence : Terrorism: Theologians say apocalyptic visions in Bible’s book of Revelation are being misinterpreted by some right-wing paramilitary groups."

Of course, violence, racial hatred, and war are diametrically opposed to Jesus Christ's call for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

It should concern us all that today's Republican Party is leaning heavily in the direction of fascism, endorsing patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, racial violence, totalitarianism, and war, thusly jeopardizing democracy everywhere. 

I hope that people realize this and call it out like I am doing here and vigorously oppose it everywhere—especially at the ballot box. Thanks to Dr. Rudy Acuña for sharing this must-read piece below.

-Angela Valenzuela

‘Key to white survival’: how Putin has morphed into a far-right savior

The Russian president’s ‘strong man’ image and disdain for liberals has turned him into a hero for white nationalists

Sergio Olmos

Sat 5 Mar 2022 02.00

Putin is now seen as the upholder of traditional Christianity. Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters

“Can we get a round of applause for Russia?” asked Nick Fuentes, on stage last week at a white nationalist event. Amid a roar of applause for the Russian president, just days after he invaded Ukraine, many attendees responded by shouting: “Putin! Putin!”

It would be easy to dismiss the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in Orlando, Florida, as a radical fringe. But speeches by two Republican members of Congress – one in person, the other via video – guaranteed national attention and controversy.

The backlash showed how the war in Ukraine has exposed the American far right’s affinity with Putin. That affinity is complicated by the tortured relationship between Russia and former president Donald Trump, whose rise Moscow supported with a covert operation to undermine US democracy.

Fuentes, a notorious antisemite, created AFPAC to coincide with the more mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where Trump was the headline speaker last Saturday.

At AFPAC, Fuentes introduced the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who would this week interrupt the State of the Union address, rising to yell “Build the wall!” as an objection to Joe Biden’s immigration policy. But here she did not interrupt to object to the chanting of the Russian president’s name.

“Ukraine was a place where the same perceived downfalls of western society existed and Putin embodying a strong man authoritarian-type figure stepping in and inflicting suffering on Ukraine was viewed in a positive light

Jared Holt

“I don’t believe anyone should be canceled,” Taylor Greene told the attendees of the white nationalist conference. She lashed out at a wide range of topics from Marxism to cancel culture but avoided the invasion of Ukraine, saying even less on the topic than Russian state media.

Devin Burghart, executive director of Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, said: “In the world of the white nationalists, you are seeing a lot of support for Putin, as expressed by the cheerleading at AFPAC over the weekend.”

Others agree, pointing to a shared socially and culturally conservative ideology, disdain for democratic systems and appreciation for a “strong man” form of government. There was also the fact that it was the current Ukrainian government whom Trump attempted – and failed – to bribe to investigate his political rival Biden: actions which led to his first impeachment.

Jared Holt, a domestic extremism researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said: “When Russia invaded Ukraine, large parts of the far right were supportive.”

Nicholas Fuentes flanked by anti-vaccine protesters at a demonstration in New York. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

“The common thread is this idea that because of western European and US influence on Ukraine, Ukraine was a place where the same perceived downfalls of western society existed and Putin embodying a strong man authoritarian-type figure stepping in and inflicting suffering on Ukraine was viewed in a positive light.”

Fuentes is certainly the real deal of white nationalism. He attended the deadly “Unite The Right” rally in 2017 and was recently subpoenaed over his involvement in the pro-Trump insurrection on January 6 2021. He now carries on that effort with AFPAC, aiming to create a kind of far-right archipelago by bringing together white nationalists, fascists and Trumpist crowds talking only to each other in their own islands.

The three-year-old conference sees itself as part enfant terrible, piquing the genteel wing of the Republican party, and part Weimar-era beer hall organizing before the putsch. It is far right, but no longer on the fringe of Republican politics.

Taylor Greene was condemned by some in her own party for speaking at AFPAC but is unlikely to be disciplined. And she was not alone. The Arizona congressman Paul Gosar made a video address. A lieutenant governor from Idaho and state legislator from Arizona also spoke at the event, which also attracted figures such as Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent extremist gang the Proud Boys, which currently has more than three dozen members under indictment for the insurrection.

This represents a disorienting shift for a Republican party once staunchly opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, which President Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire”. But Trump, who in 2015 ran for president promising to build a wall and impose a Muslim ban, stoked the party’s nativist elements.

Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Florida. 

Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

And as America and the world grow more diverse, critics say, Russia has come to be seen as a beacon of salvation by white nationalists. In 2004 David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, described it as “key to white survival”. In 2017 Ann Coulter, a rightwing author and commentator, opined: “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.”

Researchers who monitor far-right groups agree that the moment of Putin enthusiasm in the US has intellectual underpinnings with deeper roots. Burghart said: “For almost a decade the work of Russian fascist Alexander Dugin has found a home in American white nationalist circles.”

Dugin’s ideology is steeped in Russian Christian nationalism and has chimed with Putin’s world view. At the same time, it echoes much of the Christian nationalist activism in the US, where liberal values, gay rights and a desire to keep religion out of the state, are seen as decadent and responsible for American decline.

Burghart added: “There’s an attraction to Putin’s hardline authoritarian stand, his aggressive policies, they are attracted to his brand of traditional Christianity that Putin’s expressed. Some have liked Putin’s attacks on the Russian LGBTQ+ community.”

On the eve of the Russian invasion, former Trump aide Steve Bannon hosted private security head Erik Princ, founder of the Blackwater military contracting group, on his popular War Room podcast. The two men – who are highly influential in Trumpist circles – praised Putin as “anti-woke”.

“After four years of praise for the Russian leader there’s a large swath of the right that has internalized that message.

Devin Burghart

Bannon declared: “Putin ain’t woke.” Attacks on wokeness were also a constant thread running through CPAC, which this year had the official slogan: “Awake not woke.”

The legacy of the Trump years shapes the perception of Putin among the right in the US as Trump demonstrated a clear affinity for the Russian leader, even as details emerged of the Russian attempt in the 2016 election to disrupt US democracy. Trump himself praised Putin as “genius” and “smart” as the invasion began only to change his tune later as the military action faltered and casualties mounted.

Even then, while condemning the assault, Trump told CPAC: “The problem is not that Putin is smart – which of course he’s smart – but the real problem is that our leaders are dumb.”

The same was true of America’s most popular conservative broadcaster, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Right up to the invasion Carlson was lambasting Ukraine as “not a democracy” and a puppet state of the US state department. He also praised Putin, saying: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?”

That sort of language – contrasting Putin favorably against Democrats on mainstream US television – has an impact.

Burghart commented: “After four years of praise for the Russian leader there’s a large swath of the right that has internalized that message. Some of the right have embraced Putin while others have been slow to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.”

Burghart says some extremist rightwing militias even see Ukraine as a potential scenario to discuss how to prepare for urban warfare and a future insurgency in the US itself. Instead of horror at the outbreak of brutal urban warfare, some US extremists are obsessed with the idea of a coming civil war in America.

“They see a societal collapse and need to prepare for an impending civil war, and their focus is on preparing for the battles of that here in the US,” Burgheart added.

White Supremacist Activity in East Austin: Whatever You Do, Do not take the Bait

Students, Friends, Colleagues and all Fellow Texans:

IMPORTANT NOTICE

A colleague of mine, former UT College of Education Professor Doug Foley found these flyers from the Aryan Freedom Network in his East Austin yard on Monday.  He lives in what is now called the East campus area, close to I-35. His best guess is that they are targeting his residential area to create a race war, coinciding with Dan Patrick's expressed goal of establishing the Liberty Institute at UT—funded in part by our hard-earned tax dollars—in order to clamp down on the teaching of Critical Race Theory.

Dr. Foley is asking us to share and circulate this garbage, this disgusting invective, anywhere you see fit. As mentioned in my other post today, please do not take the bait. We must go the way of peace. Please, no violence. We're better than that.

-Angela Valenzuela

There has been one successful coup in the United States. It foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump

Put this important history on your reading list. White Supremacy dies hard. Why am I just learning of this horrible history for the first time? What we might call "Trumpism" is woven into the very fabric of this country. Yet again, another reminder of it from U.S. history.

Thanks to Dr. Barbara Flores for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela 

#EndWhiteSupremacy #BlackLivesMatter #BLM #WhiteSupremacy

There has been one successful coup in the United States. It foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump

In his failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, Donald Trump has been accused of attempting to subvert the will of the American people by instigating a coup d'etat—an act of overthrowing or usurping lawful government powers by employing unlawful or illegal means.

What many Americans may not realize is that Trump’s motives and actions, and those of the Republican Party enabling him had their genesis in a far earlier, successful coup executed over 120 years ago. Then, white citizens conspired against a municipal government in Wilmington, North Carolina.

It’s one of the primary reasons Republicans like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and his ilk are so vehemently angry about re-examinations of American history from a racial perspective. Cotton’s war on the devastating analysis contained within The New York Times’  praised and influential “1619 Project,” for example is not simply about what such fresh looks at “established” history reveal about the pervasiveness and longevity of racism in this country. Instead, their rage is fueled by what deeper looks at racism—and the nation’s long history of it—reveal about the character and motivations of the perpetrators themselves. Since race-based bigotry is impossible to defend from any rational standpoint, stories and myths to mask it are the only strategy.

As for those motivations, it can be deceptively easy to assume that racism is rooted simply in discrimination on the basis of skin color. At its most basic level, that is certainly what it is—it provides an explanation even a child can understand: Others are “bad” because they “look different.”

But “looking different” is just a foundational element for racism. It’s what comes next that matters, when the implications of looking different are weighed and contemplated within the lizard brain of those so predisposed. These same types of people have continually, through the centuries, made up a huge cross-section of America. From the nineteenth-century southern inheritors of the beaten Confederacy, known then as the Democrats, to what they swiftly transformed themselves into a century later during the Civil Rights era—the same people we now know as the modern Republican Party. Today’s Republicans are simply the latest heirs to the same racist legacy post-Reconstruction that brought us Black Codes, Jim Crow, and “Separate but Equal”: It’s a legacy that now manifests itself in the coordinated effort to restrict voting among Black people and anyone who isn’t white that is voter suppression.

Out of the many acts of terroristic violence perpetrated against African Americans since active hostilities concluded in the Civil War, what occurred in Wilmington over a few days in November 1898 was not unique in its lethal character. Some 60 (probably more) Black citizens were massacred at the hands of an angry mob of white supremacists. Similar incidents of racist violence had peppered the South for decades, fueling the inception of such domestic terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan. But the parallels with the modern goals of the Republican Party—specifically the political reasons for the massacre, coupled with what sparked the event itself—echo today in the strategy and motives underlying the Trump campaign’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election.

What motivated that 1898 Wilmington coup, known as the Wilmington Insurrection—or its longtime whitewashed historical descriptor, the “Wilmington Race Riot”—were the same things that motivate Trump and the GOP today: white power, white insecurity, and white fear. All of those put together led to a sustained campaign of voter intimidation that directly prefigures the GOP’s modern-day voter suppression script.

David W. Blight is Sterling professor of American History at Yale University. Writing for the New York Review of Books, Blight, in reviewing David Zucchino’s recent book, Wilmington’s Lie, explains what happened in Wilmington at the conclusion of the nineteenth century, and why it happened. In fact, it was this country’s only successful coup d’etat, an unlawful and violent revolt by white Americans seeking to usurp power through intimidating and suppressing the black vote and thereby eliminating its impact in “a multi-racial government in the South’s most progressive Black-majority city.”

It’s an ugly story, but parts of it will seem very ... familiar.

That month there was a concerted, carefully planned, and successful effort to violently suppress the black vote, eliminate Black elected officials, and restore white control of the city of Wilmington, as well as the entire state, to the Democrats for the cause of white supremacy. Leaders of the coup employed tactics ranging from vicious newspaper propaganda and economic intimidation to arson and lynching. Dozens of African-Americans were killed and Black political life in the area was snuffed out in a matter of days: 126,000 Black men were on the voter rolls of North Carolina in 1896; by 1902, only 6,100 remained.

As Blight emphasizes, “The Democrats of 1898 in North Carolina had the same aims, and some of the same methods, as today’s Republican vote suppressors, scheming and spending millions of dollars to thwart the right to vote with specious claims about “voter fraud.”

Despite the North’s victory in the Civil War and despite Emancipation, North Carolina, like other Southern states in the years immediately following the war, began implementing Black Codes, which in essence reverted Blacks to near-slave status, and refused to ratify the 14th Amendment—granting African Americans citizenship and equal protection under the law. Those circumstances changed, at least on paper, when the state held a constitutional convention in 1868 under Reconstruction, granting blacks the right to vote. As Blight notes, from that day forward, Blacks were viewed by the state’s white supremacists as an existential menace, a “contagion to be wiped out.” The supremacist-dominated “Democrats” quickly regained the governorship, and began systematically imposing legal and procedural “ruses,” all with the specific intent of disqualifying Black voters.

Despite these efforts, Black citizens continued to assert and increase their political participation and power in North Carolina, particularly in the second Congressional district, which encompassed Wilmington, which had elected several Black aldermen and employed several Black policemen. The district itself also voted in its first Black representative, George H. White.

As Blight explains, this situation was unheard of and intolerable to many highly placed and powerful North Carolinians, including the owner-editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, the chair of the Democratic Party, and Alfred Waddell, another avowed white supremacist, propagandist “orator” and congressman. Waddell would, through his fiery speeches, evoke racist sentiments “that had working-class white men on their feet with their Winchester rifles held high.” 

At a rally before eight thousand people on November 7, Waddell called them to arms: “Go to the polls tomorrow,” he shouted, “and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” The campaign ran training sessions on how to stuff ballot boxes and met with employers to make sure white men had the day off to vote.

Waddell had help from a homegrown base of gun-toting racists who wore specific garb to identify themselves. They called themselves the “Red Shirts,” recognizable by their clothing, which was specifically intended to make the united racists both visible and intimidating.

With the help of thousands of “Red Shirts”—bands of heavily armed men adept at intimidation and ready to kill—they sought the liquidation of Black men from political life and the overthrow of the state of North Carolina. With arsenals of guns, big and small, the campaign declared its aims overtly; ... “We must either outcheat, outcount or outshoot them!” They accomplished all three ambitions.

Blight explains that the instigators of this concerted backlash against Black participation in democracy propagated a belief system that permeated much of the attitudes of the post-Civil War generation—that their (supposed) birthright had been threatened by freed slaves, who they believed had further “degenerated” by becoming “aggressive” toward white women. Everyone knows there has never been an excuse quite as handy and self-serving for white supremacists as defending the honor—and so-called chastity—of “their” white women. According to Blight, quoting historian Joel Williamson, “These lethal concoctions of race and sex in the minds of radical racists formed a ‘psychic core’... of a new, violent redemption.”

As Blight notes, such an association “drove political organization and white frenzy more than some [modern] readers may grasp.” Because It meant that Black men who were permitted the privilege of voting—or worse, governing—could compete for white women’s affections, a prospect which drove these insecure men into a frothing, uncontrollable rage. It was a rage that white supremacist demagogues played up to the hilt.  

In Wilmington, the spark that ignited this teeming mass of ginned-up anger was a man named Alexander Lightfoot Manly. The mixed race and well-educated grandson of a former North Carolina governor and one of his enslaved women, Manly nonetheless identified as Black. He founded the City of Wilmington’s only Black daily, and in 1895 published a column challenging the prevailing idea that any sexual union between white women and Black men could only be classified as “rape.” In the summer of 1898, responding to pro-lynching rant by the wife of another white supremacist congressman, he published a fateful editorial.

As described by D.G. Martin, in a piece written for the local CBS Radio affiliate, WCHL:

In response to a widely circulated assertion that the only solution to Black aggression against white women was lynching, Manly wrote, “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly Black brute,’ when in fact, many of those who have been dealt with had white men for their fathers and were not only ‘not Black and burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is very well known to all.”

As noted by Blight, Manly also embellished his language with a taunt, writing that racist whites shouldn’t expect their daughters to “remain pure” while the white men around them continued “debauching” Black women.

This type of “insolent” attitude, coming from a Black man, was absolutely stupefying to white supremacists. Quoting Zucchino, Blight emphasizes that “A Black man had mocked the myths that had sustained whites for generations, piercing the buried insecurities of Southern white men.”  Responding to a frenzied push among the white population to lynch Manly and destroy his newspaper, the white supremacists who had been egging on anger against Blacks convinced white voters to express their fury on Election Day: Nov. 8, 1898.

And they did just that, establishing a template for what we now know as systematic, intimidating voter suppression.

Black men in Wilmington risked their lives to vote on November 8; only about half of those registered actually cast their ballots. Democrats stuffed ballot boxes in gerrymandered black precincts and destroyed Republican ballots while white men, as Zucchino puts it, “accosted Blacks at gunpoint in some wards, forcing them to turn back as they tried to reach polling stations.” In white neighborhoods, rumors spread of Black violence—rumors that Zucchino states were “pure fiction”: “Virtually all the armed men who remained on the streets throughout the night were white, not Black.”

One local white woman who kept a diary during the election noted that the whole effort was designed to intimidate Black (men) into “never vot[ing] again.” As a result, the white supremacist-inspired effort succeeded in winning the Democrats the election, and its instigators immediately instituted measures to force out the current government. The state’s media immediately praised the remarkable election results—lauding the coup and praising its leaders, while ignoring the concerted suppression and intimidation that caused it all.

Two days later, on Nov. 10, 500 white men gathered at the town’s armory and began their rampage, killing Blacks indiscriminately and destroying Black homes and Black-owned businesses. Their initial target was Alexander Manly. Upon being informed that Manly had escaped, they set fire to his newspaper office, posing for the picture that is at the top of this post. Blacks were shot in the back, many killed on their knees or in other humiliating positions. Many of the remaining Black residents fled into surrounding woods or swamps. No one was punished or prosecuted for these murders. The police chief, board of aldermen and mayor of Wilmington were summarily removed, essentially at gunpoint, and replaced by white supremacists, including Waddell—who was declared the new mayor.

As Blight notes, the impact of the Wilmington Massacre (he calls it a “pogrom”) was felt statewide, and determined the fate of North Carolina for decades to come. The coup leaders in Wilmington immediately began propagating the false story that Blacks had instigated the violence; those responsible for the actual violence went on to prominent political careers. In the state capital of Raleigh, Blight writes, “a wave of disfranchisement and other Jim Crow laws flowed from the state legislature,” and it would be decades before the state began to “unlearn” the lessons of that massacre.

And as the years passed, the mythology of a “virtuous” white supremacy and the “unworthiness” of the Black vote continued to be passed down from generation to generation, sometimes blatant, sometimes hidden, but always present, like a shadow, waiting patiently for yet another cynical demagogue to awaken and tap into the fears, grievances, and insecurities of another willing audience of pathetic, small-minded white men. 

The Age of Collective Delusion Why Societies Unable to Cope With Reality are Retreating Into Fantasies Which Rip Them Apart

Interesting piece that delves deeper in our post-truth society than conventional treatments.  The psychological dimensions should concern us to the extent that delusions, reflecting a "fragile psychology of narcissism," signal the presence, in places like the U.S. and Britain, of an over-inflated sense of worth as a polity that sees its perceived status and power as threatened.

Delusions of grandeur, persecution fantasies, and erotomania is the framework Umair Haque presents for getting into the minds of Brexiteers and Trumpists.  

In short, the stuff of fascim.

This piece, published on February 4, 2019, begs the question of a relationship between such delusional thinking and what has turned out to be our vulnerability to COVID, on the one hand, and our response to it, on the other.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Age of Collective Delusion

Why Societies Unable to Cope With Reality are Retreating Into Fantasies Which Rip Them Apart

umair haque

Feb 4, 2019

When I look around the world today — and particularly at English speaking societies — entire nations seems to be having a kind of severe mental breakdown. America. Britain. Nation after nation is falling into the grip of a kind of mania, driven by strange, foolish, downright bizarre myths. You can see evidence everywhere you look — once you know what you’re looking for. Anti-vaxxers. Flat earthers. Extremists. Supremacists. Collective delusions, all. But I want to go deeper in this little essay, and explore the collective delusion at the root of this age of collapse.

The truth is that our societies are not ruled by reason, logic, and morality anymore — they have been conquered by collective delusions — something like mass fantasies, which please us, in a time when facing the truth, reading the headlines, becomes a little more difficult every day. When we say things like “the truth doesn’t matter anymore” or “our leaders are pathological liars” or “nobody can reason with those people”, we’re talking, really about collective delusions: a psychology which can’t distinguish what’s real from what’s imagined anymore. Doesn’t that line seem to have been crossed — that enough people can’t tell what’s real from what’s imagined — to plunge even rich, powerful societies like America and Britain into spectacular breakdowns, that the world’s jaws are dropped by…in just a few short years? That’s how powerful collective delusion are, my friends — and we ignore them, their growth and genesis, their existence and reality, at our peril.

(Now, collective delusion doesn’t mean that every single person in a society believes in outlandish, bizarre things — you, gentle reader, probably don’t — but it does mean that enough of them do, to badly destabilize a society. How many is enough? The unfortunate truth, which we still haven’t quite grasped, is that it doesn’t take a majority to plunge a society in chaos — just a committed enough, collectively deluded minority, as in the cases of Brexit and American collapse, neither of which are supported by majorities anymore, but it’s too late, really, to change the explosive nature of catastrophe.)

There are three types of collective delusions which are ripping the world apart. Let me go through them one by one.

The first are delusions of grandeur. What is “Make America Great Again!” or “Brexit means Brexit!” but a delusion of grandeur, really? The technical definition is “a sense of over-inflated worth, power, or status” — or more accurately, the need for it. And that is exactly what we observe spreading around the globe — as the global economy stalls, societies are reverting to age old supremacies. Our tribe must be number one! Our nation is the best! Our destiny is not to be poor! We are the rulers of the world — everything belongs to us! This is the fundamental delusion behind the spreading wave of global neo-fascism — a return to the imperial politics of tribal warfare, the need to be superior to others, instead of coexisting as equals.

Delusions of grandeur are afflicting the English-speaking world first and hardest because the English-speaking world has long had a fragile psychology of narcissism. Britain and then America built the world’s mightiest empires. They came to think the world revolved around them — and in a way, it did — but only by force, not through consent. Brexit and Trumpism are the shadows of these dead empires, the feelings of inadequacy and neglect that haven’t been “processed” yet, as an American psychologist might say. They are reflections of the need to be above, atop, beyond everyone else — and centered by them, too. But that world also requires a return to war, supremacy, hatred, and colonization — and that is why America and Britain are regressing now at lightspeed. Enough Americans and Brits genuinely believe they must be the most powerful and supreme people in the world to sacrifice their entire societies for that very cause — breaking up with neighbours, tearing up alliances, lashing out, putting kids in camps — which, of course, is a Pyrrhic victory for any modern society.

The flipside of delusions of grandeur are persecution fantasies — and they often go hand in hand. If you are the best, the most superior, the most supreme — then why isn’t the world recognizing you? Because you are being persecuted by some malign, all-powerful monster. And if you could just get rid of them — why, then you would rise to attain your and rightful natural position of supremacy, emperor of the world.

Again, because America and Britain have the fragile psychology of dying empires — an easily broken narcissism — they are prey to persecution fantasies, too. Who are the malign monsters keeping Britain from assuming its rightful position as ruler of the seas again? The EU — who is demonized and scapegoated for all Britain’s problems by Brexiters, from austerity to stagnation to a broken healthcare system. But none of these problems are the EU’s fault — they are Britain’s very own choices. Who are the malign monsters keeping America from “being great”? They are little immigrant and refugee children. Now, a little Salvadoran child cannot hurt a grown man — never mind: because they have supernatural to infect a whole society of the pure, with laziness, violence, and greed, they are to be put in camps, locked away, separated from their parents, put on show trial.

Do you see the similarities here? You should. Both America and Britain have invented imaginary monsters to blame their problems on — and enough Americans and Brits believe that these monsters are persecuting them to destabilize their whole societies into teetering on the verge of the abyss. America is melting down into fascism — and British nationalism is about to blow up it’s economy like a suicide bomber. Both, though, are based on persecution fantasies, which are collective delusions.

Now, if you shortchanged, disappointed, frustrated, angry, disillusioned — as many Americans and Brits do, by their systems, institutions, and leaders — what you likely to feel when a demagogue comes along and tells you something like this: you are rightfully one of the pure and true — the powerful and supreme — only you have been kept down by malign, mysterious monsters, who are persecuting you? You are likely to cheer and applaud, aren’t you? It’s not your fault you’ve voted for predators for years, which has only resulted in your own ruin. Not at all. It’s someone else’s fault. Now you don’t have to feel guilty, ashamed, stupid, foolish — bad. Instead, you have a target for that rage, that disappointment — you feel good, as that tension leaves you. But the price is that all those bad feelings are transformed into easy pleasures of hate. Whoosh! Instead of feeling bad at your own folly — you feel good, at demonizing and scapegoating and hunting and hating others (who have precisely nothing to do with the plight you’ve put yourself in).

That brings me to my third kind of delusion. If you’re such a person — what do you feel for the demagogue who has taken your bad feelings, and turned them into good ones? Who has transformed the bitterness of your rage into the pleasure of hate? You feel a strong, almost unbreakable bond with such a person. They become your surrogate parent — they have protected you from harm, in an unsafe, insecure world. They will always look out for you. (They won’t, objectively — this is just what you feel.)

This delusion is called erotomania — it is the feeling that someone must really, really love you. Must genuinely care for you, must be thinking about you, puts you first. When, in fact, such a person wants nothing to do with you — or worse, is only exploiting you for their own benefit. And yet this is precisely the bond we see between Trumpists and their surrogate daddy, or true believers in Brexit and the Brexiteers who are leading them off a cliff. Daddy loves me — mommy loves me — they’d never let be hurt. They care about me more than I care about myself!

How strong is that bond? Why do I call it a collective delusion? Remember the definition of a delusion — an inability to distinguish between reality and what’s imagined? Now consider this: Britain’s literally about to run out of food and medicine in a few weeks, not according to me, but according to its entire food and pharma industries — and Brexiteers simply don’t care. Nobody can convince them this will actually happen — when in fact, it’s beginning to happen as we speak, in plain sight for all to see. It’s pure, shattering, astonishing delusion. And beneath lies an erotomanic bond of broken-minded people with demagogues.

Have you ever wondered why you can’t “reason” with a Trumpist? Why a Brexiteer will simply just ignore reality? It’s because erotomania is occurring — what psychologists might call an “erotomanic transfer.” They have bonded so strongly to demagogues, they feel about them like they would surrogate parents — Trumpists and Brexiteers believe, just like little children, that mommy and daddy will always look after them, even until the end of the world. There is nothing you can say to convince them otherwise because there is nothing that can be said at all to convince them otherwise. They are operating at a level below words, at a level of pure feelings. The pleasure of erotomania grips them in a kind of delusional mania — and you can see it on the rapturous, ecstatic faces at Trump or Brexit rallies: can you see the same note of fervent exhilaration I do? It’s the look of infantile regression — when an adult has become an infant, and feels perfectly cared by an ideal mommy and daddy again.

This pattern of collective delusion — delusions of grandeur, which feed persecution fantasies, held in place by an unbreakable erotomanic bond with a demagogue, which operates far below the level of the adult mind — we’ve seen it before. It’s exactly what happened in 1930s Germany. It’s what happened in Iran, in Turkey, in Russia. It’s happened time and again in history. There is a nation in trouble — plunged into adversity by its own foolish choices. Along comes a demagogue, and blames its troubles on the vulnerable, the powerless, the other. The masses exult, in a kind of perpetual histrionic mania, screaming and shouting and cheering and smiling.

This is the story of ruin, my friends. It is the story of fascism, of nationalism, of extremism. It is the general sociopsychological pattern of the implosion of nations — how a social mind descends into a state where it can no longer distinguish difficult reality from pleasing fantasy.

That is where we are now. This is the age of collective delusion. The delusions that mark this age are spreading, thanks to cheap, ubiquitous technology, thanks to propaganda, thanks to dark wars of information, across the globe. America and Britain are societies which have fallen, in this new century, prey to collective delusions that have ripped them apart. Will they be the last — or are they just the first?

The story doesn’t change. The delusions are always the same. It’s only the names of the peoples who succumb to them that does. In that sense, my friends, history never goes anywhere, but around the wheel of folly.

Umair
February 2019