In the past, Massie has also voted against funding for Holocaust education
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism
Late Wednesday night, the House passed the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act after a push from Democrats seeking to curb extreme domestic terrorism after the Buffalo shooting, the Associated Press reports. The bill went through with a 222-203 vote, almost along party lines—the only Republican who voted yes was Rep.…
Doug Mastriano is the perfect reflection of today’s GOP. More than Trump, he is the MAGA base
For all the talk about how Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates would fare in the Republican primaries this year, the results in this week’s races made clear: Whatever happens to Trump’s personal influence, Trumpism is consolidating its dominance of the GOP.
The former president’s scorecard on Tuesday was mixed. Candidates he endorsed won the GOP nominations for governor in Pennsylvania and Senate in North Carolina, while his preferred choice for Idaho governor failed to topple the incumbent and his late intervention could not save troubled young Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. The Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary remains too close to call between the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, Trump’s candidate, and David McCormick, whom Trump has criticized.
Yet more revealing than what happened to the candidates Trump endorsed was how many candidates endorsed him. As in Republican primaries earlier this year, no top-tier contenders in any of Tuesday’s races ran on repudiating the bruising economic and racial nationalism that Trump has solidified as the GOP’s dominant ideology. In several contests, particularly the Pennsylvania Senate race, all of the leading candidates sought to define themselves as the most committed to Trump’s MAGA agenda—even McCormick, an Army veteran and former hedge-fund CEO. And almost all of the leading candidates echoed, to varying degrees, the former president’s discredited claims that he lost the 2020 election only because of widespread fraud.
“If ’22 was going to be a test of Trump and Trumpism’s dominance of the party, so far he’s pretty dominant and it’s pretty dominant,” says Bill Kristol, a leader among the GOP’s embattled Never Trump forces.
The determination of so many candidates to identify as Trump allies is a clear marker of how Republican voters themselves continue moving to the right. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the composition of the GOP primary electorate is “pretty dramatically different” from even 20 years ago, says John Brabender, a longtime Republican consultant in the state. “It is much more blue-collar Republicans, social-conservative Republicans, and Tea Party Republicans that dominate the primaries,” he told me, and fewer white-collar moderates in the suburbs outside Philadelphia. North Carolina, where Trump endorsee Representative Ted Budd won a Senate primary on Tuesday, has undergone a similar shift, as has Ohio, where J. D. Vance, also backed by Trump, prevailed in the Republican Senate primary earlier this month.
[David Frum: The J.D. Vance I knew]
As the Republican electorate shifts away from the kinds of voters who might have resisted Trump, the party’s tilt toward Trumpism has become self-perpetuating. Trumpism, it seems, no longer depends on Trump himself.
Pennsylvania has a tradition of electing moderate Republican governors (Richard Thornburgh, Tom Ridge) and senators (John Heinz, Arlen Specter). But neither GOP primary this year produced a viable candidate who would qualify as a true moderate or even a Trump skeptic. The gubernatorial primary went decisively to far-right State Senator Doug Mastriano, who led efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election result in the state, supports banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy without exceptions for rape and incest, wants to repeal a state law allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail, and has associated with figures in the extreme Christian-nationalist movement. Mastriano’s closest rival was Lou Barletta, who, as a mayor and later a U.S. representative, made his name by pushing hard-line policies against undocumented immigrants and became one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016.
The GOP Senate primary became a bidding war over who could demonstrate the most fealty to Trump. Oz relentlessly touted Trump’s endorsements and echoed his discredited claims of election fraud. The firebrand conservative commentator Kathy Barnette insisted, in effect, that she was more MAGA than Trump himself. Even after Trump disparaged him as a “liberal, Wall Street Republican,” McCormick, who might have been the establishment choice in another time, described himself as an “America First” conservative and promised to fight for Trump’s agenda. McCormick didn’t fully endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, but neither did he refute them, speaking of “all sorts of election irregularities which have essentially created a situation where Republicans, the majority of Republicans, don’t believe in the result.”
The Pennsylvania race reprised the recent Senate primary in Ohio, another state with a fading tradition of electing moderate Republicans (among them, George Voinovich, John Kasich, and Rob Portman, the retiring senator). Not only did Republicans nominate Vance—the author and former venture capitalist who reinvented himself as a MAGA-style populist and provocateur—but all five of the serious contenders in the race had said they would support Trump if he becomes the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
[David Graham: John Fetterman wins on vibes]
In North Carolina on Tuesday, the double-barreled support of Trump and the conservative Club for Growth propelled Budd, who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, to a decisive victory. As of the latest results, Budd got more than double the number of votes of the next closest candidate, former Governor and Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a more traditional, business-oriented Republican, who withered under charges that he was insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era party. A Budd win in November would constitute a significant lurch to the right for the state, whose retiring Republican senator, Richard Burr, voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial after the January 6 insurrection.
This pattern has been more mixed in races for governor than for Senate. Although Mastriano won Pennsylvania, Idaho Governor Brad Little, a staunch conservative, easily turned aside a challenge from his even more conservative lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who had Trump’s endorsement. In Ohio earlier this month, Governor Mike DeWine, who positions himself closer to the center of the GOP, beat three conservative challengers (though he surprisingly received less than half of votes cast). In Georgia’s primary this coming Tuesday, Governor Brian Kemp, another staunch conservative, is expected to roll past his Trump-endorsed challenger, former Senator David Perdue.
GOP voters “don’t have the ire toward their statehouse that they do toward the U.S. Capitol,” suggests Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the centrist-Democratic group Third Way. Yet the overall tilt toward Trump-style candidates remains unmistakable this year.
That tilt reflects the fundamental shift in the GOP coalition that Brabender identified. In a process that predates Trump but has greatly accelerated since his emergence, the GOP has grown more reliant on non-college-educated, non-urban, and religiously conservative voters, many of whom express anxiety about demographic and cultural change in polls, while shedding support from college-educated and more moderate voters, especially those clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.
Pennsylvania crystallizes that change. In the early 1990s, about one-third of Republican primary votes in the state were cast across the southeast, in Philadelphia and its four surrounding suburban counties, according to calculations by Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster. But by 2018, as residents of those suburbs continued a generation-long migration toward the Democratic Party, the Philadelphia region’s share of the state’s GOP primary vote had fallen to a little over one-fifth.
Simultaneously, the mostly blue-collar counties around Pittsburgh, in southwestern Pennsylvania, slightly increased their share of the GOP vote, while the less densely populated counties in the state’s center increased their share even more, Yost found. Results as of early Wednesday suggest that these patterns largely held in this primary, with Philadelphia and its suburbs again contributing only a little more than one-fifth of GOP primary votes, the southwest a little less than one-fifth, and the interior counties the remainder.
According to statewide Franklin & Marshall polls that Yost provided to me, from 2000 to 2022 the share of registered Republicans in Pennsylvania who were college graduates has declined slightly (even while college graduates’ representation nearly doubled among Democrats and increased by almost one-third among independents). The share of Republicans who identify as moderates or liberals has fallen by about half, as has the share who support tougher gun-control measures or believe that abortion should be legal in all circumstances; the share of Republicans who own guns has soared. “We’ve all heard about the realignment along [a] religious and cultural axis, but it’s pretty clear in this state that’s what’s happened,” Yost said. “And I think that mirrors the country as a whole.”
Indeed, in Ohio’s 2006 Republican Senate primary, when then-Senator DeWine defeated two conservative alternatives, the state’s three most populous counties—Franklin, Cuyahoga, and Hamilton—accounted for 22 percent of the total primary vote. This year, their share fell to about 18 percent, with the Republican vote growing in blue-collar northeast counties that have been battered by industrial decline, as well as in economically strained smaller cities like Akron and Toledo. In North Carolina, the GOP primary vote similarly has grown less reliant on the state’s big population centers and inner suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, and more dependent on distant suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, according to calculations shared with me by Michael Bitzer, the chair of the political-science department at Catawba College in Salisbury.
What does this mean for the future direction of the GOP? The challenge for the small remnant of Republican candidates who resist Trump—or even those who want to support his general direction without personally bending the knee to him—is that these changes have shrunk the audience for any alternative path. As voters who are uneasy with Trumpism—largely college-educated suburbanites in metropolitan areas—have drifted away from the party, the core left behind is more receptive to Trump-style arguments. And the more that GOP primaries produce Trump-style candidates, the less likely center-right voters will be to vote in such elections at all.
That leaves little hope in the near term for the dwindling band of conservatives and Republicans who want to see the party shift back away from Trumpism. “There was a time I thought you could remove him and save the party,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, tweeted on Monday. “But looking at these GOP primaries—not to mention the last 18 months—it’s clear Trump has metastasized across the party. And it can’t be saved.”
While the triumph of Trumpism seems assured for now inside the GOP, less clear is whether it is a reliable formula for winning general elections. With as many as three-fourths of adults expressing discontent over the country’s direction, Republicans are highly likely to make gains in the November midterm elections, and the party’s winners inevitably will include some candidates in the Trump mold. But Democrats are optimistic—and some Republicans are wary—that GOP nominees such as Mastriano and, if he prevails, Oz will prove too extreme or flawed to win even in this environment.
“Democrats might be able to ride out the storm, so to speak, and flip a Senate seat,” says Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant. “And to think you can flip a Senate seat in this political environment—it’s incredible, because if [Republicans] would just stick with sane candidates, there’s no way we win that race.”
Brabender countered that it’s wrong to discount almost any Republican at a moment when voters are so unhappy. “People are going to learn that the environment is going to dominate much more than the candidates will,” he predicted.
At minimum, it appears highly unlikely that November will produce the widespread repudiation of Trump-style candidates that critics such as Kristol consider the prerequisite to any GOP course correction. And if voters don’t decisively reject Trumpism in November, the odds increase that the GOP will embrace Trumpism again in 2024, either with Trump himself or another candidate who has embraced his agenda, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
That likelihood has huge implications not just for the competition between the two parties, but for American democracy. Republican primary voters so far have nominated multiple candidates who echo some version of Trump’s wild claims of 2020 election fraud, who promise to make it more difficult to vote, and who signal, as in Mastriano’s case, that they might seek to overturn any Democratic victory for president. The real price of Trumpism’s grip on the GOP might be a full-scale constitutional crisis in 2024.
Hard-right candidates who challenged 2020 result win string of primary victories on a good night too for progressive Democrats
Republican candidates who questioned, denied and challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election won a string of consequential primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina this week, a testament to the enduring power of Donald Trump’s voter fraud myth, which continues to animate the hard-right movement he started.
In a campaign season dominated by angst over the economy and frustration with leadership in Washington, several hard-right candidates successfully channeled conservative grassroots momentum, and are now in striking distance of positions that will have enormous influence over voting and elections administration in battleground states across the country.
GOP voters still love Trump — but now realize it’s easier for authoritarians to win if they put people to sleep
By playing the victim of “cancel culture,” Fox recasts white nationalism as rebellion instead of violent racism
“The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
These are not the words of the teenager who walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday to hunt down Black Americans, although they might as well be. These are the words of Tom Buchanan, a rich, repugnant character in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
Shortly before the massacre in Buffalo, authorities say, the shooter published a 180-page document that is an unpleasant mixture of the disconcertingly new and the horribly familiar. Underneath the superficial novelty of the suspect’s alleged actions (livestreaming the atrocity on Twitch, publishing the manifesto on Google Docs) and his vocabulary (his complaint about buying a “cucked” assault rifle that he had to modify, for example) is a sprawling, discredited ideology that was once entertained by respectable people and has now crept back toward the mainstream.
[Graeme Wood: Why Tucker Carlson should want the Buffalo manifesto made public]
The manifesto is steeped in early-20th-century scientific racism—which motivated Gatsby’s Buchanan—and the anti-Semitism that so often accompanied it. The document contains pages of memes about Jewish control of the world, plus scientific-looking scattergraphs of IQs broken down by racial group. Call this the intersectionality of hate: Just as academics have pointed out that marginalized identities (race, class, sex, disability) can overlap and reinforce one another, so too can old hatreds. Far-right movements are flexible about identifying the “other” from which their adherents are supposedly under threat. Many fascists see liberated women as a symbol of social decadence and decline. The KKK also targeted Jews. That an anti-Black racist like the Buffalo shooter would also be in thrall to anti-Semitic tropes might seem surprising, but intersectional hate is a totalizing ideology. Every new talking point is woven into the same tapestry, in which white men are at the center, protecting “their” women, and everyone else is at the margins.
The Buffalo shooter is open about the source of his radicalization. It was the internet, and specifically an anonymous discussion board on 4chan. “There I learned through infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out,” he writes. He distributes the blame among Black Americans—whom he depicts as violent and lazy—and “the Jews and the elite” who control them.
Although he doesn’t mention them by name, the shooter’s grievance also lies with white women, through his invocation of falling birth rates and the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that accuses left-wing politicians of encouraging immigration to undermine majority white, Christian societies and create new, obedient voter bases. In his mythology, Black Americans are among “the replacers”—a dehumanizing term repeatedly invoked in the document—while the masterminds of the replacement are Jews. This is one example of how hatreds amplify one another: If Black Americans are so inferior, how can they be a threat to the glorious white race? Ah, because they are being directed by shadowy puppet masters. And which group has been cast in this role throughout history? The Jews.
[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]
Although the American strain of white supremacy is distinctive, recent terrorists have been influenced by many overlapping ideas. The man who massacred 51 people at a New Zealand mosque in 2019 subscribed to the European version of Great Replacement theory, in which the demographic attack comes from Muslims, and Jews do not prominently feature. The gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the same year released a manifesto warning of a “Hispanic invasion.” The man who set fire to a mosque and shot four people in a synagogue in Poway, California, insisted in his own screed that Jews deserved to die “for their role in feminism which has enslaved women in sin.”
The ideology might be flexible, but it always returns the same answer: The West is in decline; the white race is under threat, and it must be protected by violence. In place of the messy truth that migration is a continuous churn driven by war, famine, and individuals’ desire for a better life, the Great Replacement suggests a coherent plan controlled by knowable forces. Such theories thrive in hard times, because they offer themselves as an antidote to chaos.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Francis Galton and other then-respected scientists talked earnestly about classifying humans into “superior” and “inferior” races. Galton’s heirs used the new technology of the IQ test, originally developed to identify children struggling at school, to collect proof of the alleged superiority of Europeans. Their work depended on definitions of whiteness, and rigid racial categories, that have since been debunked. (At various times in American history, Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants would not have been considered white in the same way as those of “Nordic stock.”) Today’s geneticists know better than to build their work on such shifting sands.
Nevertheless, the blithe assertions of early eugenicists and scientific racists are now being recast, a century later, in the clunky visual style of the modern internet, with its homemade cut-and-paste jobs of text overlaid on graphics. The anti-Semitic tropes in the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto could come straight from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated text about a minority with disproportionate powers to control the world, or Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. But these ideas are presented in picture form. Page after page identifies people who hold important jobs as Jews; readers are left to form their own (predestined) conclusion. Also included are tables of supposedly Jewish facial features that could have come straight from a 19th-century phrenology handbook. “He’s saying something that I’ve never seen so clearly expressed before,” Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist who writes about scientific racism, told me. “He was radicalized by infographics.”
[Kathleen Belew: White power, white violence]
The slapdash, collage style of the manifesto is the true novelty here; the author discusses his underwear, his lunch plans, and his Myers-Briggs profile alongside his murderous hatred of Black Americans, Jews, and other races. This format underscores how today’s terrorists tend to radicalize themselves, alone, at home. They are technically “lone wolves” but are in constant dialogue with the internet’s bleakest corners. The blizzard of facts and figures on far-right websites flatters them into thinking they have followed a trail of clues and arrived at the truth themselves, unlike the blinkered herd. It is a narcissistic fantasy that casts the young radical as the hero of his own quest—a detective story in which he is an active participant. Many mass shooters have a sense of grievance in search of a mythology. The manifesto’s author claims that he found communism at age 12 but rejected it when he found something more useful to his psychological needs.
Rutherford, the author of the book How to Argue With a Racist, studies how academic research into intelligence and population genetics is laundered for use on white-supremacist websites. He cites the example of a mainstream paper on inheritance that featured a scatterplot on characteristics of people of Jewish descent, and ended up in racist internet posts. The simple addition of group labels such as “quadroon Jews”—a term repurposed from Jim Crow–era America—transformed a careful scientific study into a piece of racist propaganda. “This is using science to prop up a preexisting ideology. It’s exactly what happened in the 1900s with the [genetics] work of Gregor Mendel—the eugenicists seized on it,” Rutherford said. “It’s the same as it ever was. New techniques, old story.”
People drawn to intersectional omni-hatred can find multiple on-ramps online. One way into this mindset is through tasteless jokes—many users of sites such as 4chan see mocking the Holocaust as thrillingly transgressive. But ironic anti-Semitism expressed for shock value can shade into overt, unironic anti-Semitism expressed as a genuine belief. Another on-ramp is the debate, now simmering for more than a century, about the supposed connection between race and intelligence. Modern geneticists are reluctant to make sweeping statements about populations, but their nuanced disputes about the influence of environment versus heredity are presented instead by the far right as the left-wing suppression of obvious but unspeakable facts. (The resurgence of scientific racism as a political force poses a challenge to genetics researchers, many of whom would prefer to dodge these controversial questions altogether but risk leaving the field clear for cranks.)
[Adam Serwer: Demography is not destiny]
Anti-feminism is also a route to the far right. Nearly all mass shooters are men, and the tone of many far-right sites assumes that all their readers are male. White women mainly exist in this ideology to be protected from rape by “invaders” or from their own desire to have children with nonwhite men. Feminism is a threat because it frees women from men’s economic control and might encourage them to pursue careers at the expense of motherhood. The Buffalo shooter invoked a white-supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The “we” are white men, framed as soldiers and martyrs, posing as the heroic defenders of the weak. A power fantasy is baked into this ideology, but so is fear—a clammy horror of becoming redundant and obsolete.
In the 1920s and ’30s, a prominent man could voice his discriminatory thoughts about “inferior” races and “the international Jew” out loud, in public; Gatsby’s fictional Buchanan had real-life counterparts in Ford and Father Coughlin. In the century since, pseudoscientific racism has been driven to the margins of society and appears instead in watered-down forms, in allusions, winks, and dog whistles. (Especially after the Buffalo shooting, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been widely criticized for promoting the Great Replacement theory. But as my colleague Graeme Wood notes, Carlson could not keep his job if he presented it in the grotesque terms expressed in the shooter’s manifesto.) Yet the banishment of overt scientific racism from the public square has given it a new glamour online, where it marinates alongside other forms of hatred and draws adherents who convince themselves that urgent truths are being suppressed. That mindset allows young men to brick themselves inside a mental castle of half-truths and old lies, fed by their own sense that they deserved better, and they could be remembered as a hero, if only they picked up a gun.
Before attending a conference for climate deniers a few years back, I received two pieces of advice from researchers who frequent that circuit: first, that most of what’s said at climate denial events is projection and second, that there’s no sense trying to find coherence in any of it.
What I heard that week will sound familiar to anyone who’s watched Fox News or a Republican attack ad in the last five years: Radical environmentalists treat rising temperatures as a Trojan horse for socialism. Maybe climate change does exist—maybe that’s even a good thing!—but we can’t know for certain either what’s causing it or what to do about it.
Following suit, keynote speaker and California Congressman Tom McClintock said that the left should not be allowed to stake an “uncontested” claim to climate science. “They carry the argument that the earth hangs in the balance,” he told the crowd, “and if the earth truly hangs in the balance, well then no measure is too extreme.”
“For too long,” Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, echoing McClintock, “we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs.”
On Friday, the 18-year-old white man now charged with having shot 13 people and killed 10 in a Buffalo supermarket posted a sprawling 180-page white supremacist manifesto shortly before opening fire, noting that he had deliberately chosen to terrorize a store in a predominately Black neighborhood with predominately Black clientele, having set out to “kill as many blacks as possible.” Like mass shooters in New Zealand and El Paso, Texas—who set out to murder Muslims and Latinos, respectively—he also referred to himself as an ecofascist, pointing to overpopulation of nonwhite people as a driver of environmental destruction in a rant that amounted to microwaved Blood and Soil nationalism.
“For too long,” Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, echoing McClintock, “we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs.” He blamed the left for “presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization, whilst offering no true solution to either issue.”
Gendron’s embrace of the “great replacement theory”—the idea that white people are being systematically overrun by nonwhite people, heartily espoused by the likes of Tucker Carlson and all manner of prominent Republicans—has grabbed headlines. But last Friday’s shooting and others in recent years have also made something else clear: that the right is breeding a new generation of environmental extremists.
The barb of “environmental extremism,” of course, is one that conservatives traditionally lob at the left. But the left’s “environmental extremists” are by and large engaging in lobbying and nonviolent direct action to urge the world’s governments to spend trillions of dollars a year decarbonizing the global economy to keep temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—a goal that remains perilously far off. The right’s environmental extremists, by contrast, have murdered scores of people in acts of vigilante ethnic cleansing.
How they got there isn’t hard to track. Climate topics still verboten for right-wing elites—many of whom are getting paid by polluting industries directly, and accordingly treat fossil fuels as another front in the culture war—are fair game for the rabble they’re stoking, particularly the young and Nazi-meme-addled.
Sixty percent of young people surveyed by the University of Bath last year reported being “extremely” or “very” worried about the climate crisis. More than half said it makes them feel “afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty.” Fortunately, in the United States, concerns about climate change and the environment have tended to go hand in hand with liberal views on everything from abortion to immigration. But that’s not something to take for granted.
The paranoid racist fantasies of national decline being spun by the likes of Carlson, J.D. Vance, and other “populist” GOP luminaries offer a grab bag of ideological frameworks that viewers can map onto their own set of concerns. Statistically speaking, that will include the climate crisis, whether or not rising temperatures are a central focus. As that crisis becomes unavoidable for more and more people in the U.S.—already dealing with extreme heat and rising temperatures—it stands to reason that the ranks of right-wing environmental extremists will grow. Prominent Republicans have also made guns widely available to help such extremists act on their beliefs as the world warms.
Carlson has casually flirted with ecofascism in recent years; after all, it’s a short conceptual jump from both the great replacement theory and the garden-variety white supremacy that may as well be the GOP party line. “Isn’t crowding your country,” Carlson mused in 2019, in conversation with the Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins, “the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn’t want to live?”
One of the defining fights of the twenty-first century will be over access to land that’s safe to live on. Half of all addresses in the contiguous U.S. already face some degree of wildfire risk, according to data released this week. By 2070, 19 percent of the world will be too hot for humans to live on. Residents of Southeast Asia have experienced such temperatures since March, as temperatures in Delhi reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
Prominent voices on the right are giving their base a road map to navigate that world in zero-sum terms. Meanwhile, their representatives in Congress are doing everything in their power—from blocking climate policy to boosting drilling—to ensure that the situation continues to get catastrophically worse. It should come as no surprise that this toxic cocktail is already showing up in shooter manifestos. After all, “if the earth truly hangs in the balance, well then no measure is too extreme.”
The 18-year-old white supremacist who traveled to Buffalo to shoot Black shoppers at the local supermarket didn’t only target the 10 Black people whom he killed. His hate-filled manifesto made clear that he aimed to target all Black people in the U.S. — and also mass organizing for racial justice.
“Black communities and Black families must once again grieve the loss of loved ones — mothers, fathers, partners, siblings, friends — at the hands of white supremacy and racialized violence,” Radical organizer and activist Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter and Principal of Black Futures Lab, told Truthout in the wake of the attack. “I am heartbroken and my heart extends to every family who lost a loved one in this weekend’s senseless violence.”
Garza added: “The shooter wrote a manifesto, and my name was included in it. This is the second time in two years that this has occurred. The first time, I was targeted along with several others in a plot to cause violence and destruction.”
According to the New York Times, the manifesto published by the mass shooter, Payton S. Gendron, stated that he had decided to target east Buffalo “because it held the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in the state’s Southern Tier, a predominately white region that borders Pennsylvania.” The killer’s manifesto praised the white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and also praised the white supremacist shooter who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
The attack has spurred renewed calls for mass organizing across the country. Garza is also calling for swift action to curtail the proliferation of racial terror and broader participation in ongoing mass organizing efforts in the U.S. to push back against the emboldening of white supremacists nationwide.
Garza emphasizes that combatting the emboldened forces of white supremacy in the U.S. while simultaneously confronting other forms of inequality, poverty, climate crisis and environmental injustice will require building broad-based social movements with the power to significantly alter how capitalist institutions function and the strategic vision to initiate a transition toward a new socioeconomic order beyond capitalism. These have never been easy tasks, yet they are even more important in our own time as global neoliberalism has intensified economic and social contradictions and the climate crisis threatens to end organized human life.
In the interview that follows, Garza explains why racism continues to play such a critical role in our society, how to build independent Black political power, which is the mission of Black Futures Lab, and what is needed in the face of attacks like the white supremacist shooting in Buffalo.
Garza added: “The shooter wrote a manifesto, and my name was included in it. This is the second time in two years that this has occurred.”
C.J. Polychroniou: What words would you like to offer up in this moment, as people absorb the horrifying news of the anti-Black mass shooting in Buffalo?
Alicia Garza: White nationalist violence is escalating — and the leadership of this country refuses to do anything significant about it. For the last six years, the former president, his supporters and like-minded politicians have taken up a bullhorn to work up white nationalists, white supremacists and vigilantes. They have gained political capital by stoking the fears of people who fear demographic change, and given political and moral cover to those who respond to these changes — and to their fear of and anxiety about this country’s undeniable future — with violence. This is not new. We know the backlash that occurs when Black communities flex our power. The response has always been racialized terror and racialized violence, and it is being used on purpose.
While the president tours the country encouraging states to spend COVID dollars on expanding police forces, white supremacists are wreaking havoc in our government and in our lives. White supremacists are emboldened when they know that there are no significant consequences for their actions, and when they realize they have sympathizers and allies in our government. Which political party will take real action to save lives and to save this country? We don’t need any more empty words, statements, or symbolic gestures. We need action, and we deserve real change.
Companies like Wikipedia and Facebook are also complacent, as they shelter and provide information that allows white nationalists to carry out racial terror. The existence of a profile I did not initiate has been leveraged to obtain sensitive information about myself and my family for the second time. Despite our safety being compromised, Wikipedia continues to refuse to do anything about it, ostensibly in the name of free speech and protecting “user generated content.” But what happens when those users are white supremacists? I am not the only one Wikipedia will not protect — journalists and other activists are experiencing these same challenges on their site. They are just one of a few sites that excuse and condone the invasion of our privacy and leave us vulnerable to attacks from people who want to harm us because of the work we do.
Without swift and decisive action, we will continue to see racial terror proliferate, and more innocent lives will be stolen.
You have been an organizer and a civil rights activist for over two decades. You are the co-creator of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and principal at Black Futures Lab (BFL). Could you share your thoughts on why racism remains a foundational feature of U.S. society?
Racism remains a foundational feature of U.S. society because it is key in distributing power. Power is the ability to make the rules and change the rules, and racism helps to determine who gets to make the rules. Racism provides the justifications for why some people have and some people don’t, why some people live longer than others, have roofs over their heads and jobs, why some people can be doing really well while others are really struggling. Racism keeps us from fighting back, together, against these rigged rules, because racism helps to obscure that the rules are rigged in the first place.
White nationalist violence is escalating — and the leadership of this country refuses to do anything significant about it.
Tell us about Black Futures Lab. How did it come about and what are its primary aims and ultimate goals?
The Black Futures Lab works to make Black communities powerful in politics, so that we can be powerful in the rest of our lives. We work to equip Black communities with the tools we need to undo the rules that are rigged against us, and to replace rigged rules with new rules that move all of us forward, together.
I started the Black Futures Lab, and another political organization, the Black to the Future Action Fund, to build independent Black political power — that means to put Black communities in a position to make the rules and change the rules, and to be a part of deciding who gets what, when, and why. At the Black Futures Lab, we have a few strategies that we employ to build Black political power. We collect recent and relevant data about who our communities are and what we want from our government — the Black Census Project is a part of that work.
With the Black Census Project, we are working to collect 200,000 responses from Black communities across the nation, to learn more about what we’re experiencing every day, and what we want to see done about it. We do policy and legislative advocacy work, taking the information from our research and using it to inform policy that would improve the lives of Black communities. We also train our communities how to write, win and implement new rules that would improve our lives in cities and states. We design good public policy and work to get it passed in order to motivate and activate Black communities to vote. And we invest in our communities with the resources we need to be powerful. We provide resources for organizing that folk may not have access to otherwise.
Through our first Black Census Project, we provided Black organizations with resources to hire organizers, and the technology they needed to reach as many people as possible; we’re doing the same with this year’s Black Census Project. This year, we’ll be moving about $2 million to Black organizing work, to Black-led organizations across the country.
The problem of low wages is considered to be the most pressing one among Black respondents who took part in a recent Black Census initiated by BFL. What do you consider to be the best strategies for raising wages and improving labor standards for people of color?
In order to address the problem of low wages that are not enough to support a family, Black Census respondents favored raising the minimum wage to $15/hour and increasing government participation in providing housing and health care. In the most recent Temperature Check polls run by the Black to the Future Action Fund, respondents want to see an extension of the COVID-19 stimulus bill in the form of monthly $2,000 checks until the pandemic is over. Respondents indicate that they would use that stimulus check for matters of survival — rent/mortgage, utilities, healthcare. We also see a desire to strengthen unions and regulate workplaces and corporations in order to address labor standards and wages.
Black communities and people in poverty have disproportionately high exposure to health and environmental risks. Given that environmental racism is very real in the U.S., what do you envision to be the role of Black Futures Lab in the struggle against environmental racism and in the broader task of building a global climate movement?
Black communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental racism. We found in our Temperature Check Polls that Black people understood the environment to be about more than weather — it was also about having access to the things we need to live well. A third of our respondents said that lack of access to clean drinking water was a major concern for them, and 31 percent said that a lack of access to healthy food was one of their primary concerns related to environmental racism. Our role is to show the impact on Black communities, and ensure that the resolution to those impacts present themselves in public policy that we win and implement in cities and states across the country.
While the president tours the country encouraging states to spend COVID dollars on expanding police forces, white supremacists are wreaking havoc in our government and in our lives.
Forging a common identity among people from diverse communities, with a shared worldview and a shared strategy in the pursuit of justice and radical social change, defined the mission of social movements worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s. I may be wrong, but I don’t see this being the case with many of today’s social movements, which seem to concentrate overwhelmingly on single issues and are indeed deprived of an overarching agenda for transforming our world. What are your own thoughts on this matter? Is it possible to build a broad and inclusive social movement in the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of the 21st century that challenges the existing socioeconomic order while envisioning a future that works for all?
I can completely understand why it feels like our movements are siloed — and I do think that there are and have been many efforts at creating and advancing an overarching agenda to change the world. Because so much of our work happens in nonprofit vehicles that are forced to rely on philanthropy and philanthropic dollars, our work begins to reflect the challenges we face in funding it. Philanthropy is largely divided into single issues, and if our movement is dependent on philanthropy to survive, it means we will likely be organized in this way as well. We also have to keep rebuilding our infrastructure to account for the attacks we experience from the state and, frankly, from inside our own ranks. History is not linear, and there are a lot of different factors that contribute to our state of being. But, from the Movement for Black Lives to Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, there are seeds being planted that aim to coalesce our movements into something coherent and cohesive and hopefully, one day, unstoppable. And that is something that gives me a lot of hope.