Posted Aug 8, 2022 8:56 AM
Sophie Bjork-James
Vanderbilt University / The Conversation
White nationalists continue to show up for hearings of the United States House Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Evidence is mounting that white nationalist groups who want to establish an all-white state played a significant role in the violent attack on the US Capitol that left five people dead and dozens injured.
So far, the hearings “have documented how the Proud Boys helped lead the insurgent mob in the US Capitol building in Washington, DC,” journalist James Risen wrote in The Intercept.
Based on July 12, 2022 testimony from a former member of the Oath Keepers, the white nationalist group has coordinated with the Three Percenters, another white nationalist group and the Proud Boys to mobilize their extremist groups to gather in Washington, DC on January 29. 6, as requested by President Trump in his December 16, 2020 tweet.
As a cultural anthropologist who has studied these movements for more than a decade, I know that membership in these organizations is not limited to the attempt to violently overthrow the government and constitutes an ongoing threat as demonstrated by the massacres carried out by young men radicalized by this movement. .
In 2020, for example, the Department of Homeland Security described domestic violent extremists as “presenting the most persistent and deadly threat” to the people of the United States and the nation’s government.
In March 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that the number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists had nearly tripled since he took office in 2017.
“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem of domestic terrorism has metastasized across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon. ”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights group, tracked 733 active hate groups across the United States in 2021.
From my research, the internet and social media have made the problem of white supremacist hatred much worse and more visible; it is both more accessible and ultimately more violent, as seen on January 6 at the United States Capitol and the shooting deaths of ten black people in a Buffalo grocery store, among other examples.
A large online network
In the 1990s, former KKK leaders, including David Duke, rebranded white supremacy for the digital age.
They replaced KKK dresses with business suits and associated anti-Semitic neo-Nazi plots with broader anti-black, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic racism.
From the 1990s to the late 2000s, this movement largely built quiet online communities and websites peddling racist disinformation.
In fact, for years one of the first Martin Luther King Jr. websites recommended by a Google search was a website created by white nationalists who spread neo-Nazi propaganda.
In 2005, the white nationalist site Stormfront.org had 30,000 members – which may seem like a lot. But as social media has grown, with Facebook and Twitter opening up to anyone with an email address in 2006, her views have garnered far more attention. In 2015, 250,000 people signed up to become members of Stormfront.org.
Between 2012 and 2016, white nationalists on Twitter saw a 600% increase in Twitter followers. They have since worked to bring white supremacism into everyday politics.
The Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit tech industry watchdog, found that in 2020, half of the white nationalist groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center had a presence on Facebook.
Without clear regulations preventing extremist content, digital companies, in my view, have enabled the spread of white nationalist conspiracies.
Racist activists have used algorithms as virtual megaphones to reach audiences of previously unimaginable sizes.
Enter the ‘alt-right’
White nationalist leaders, such as Richard Spencer, wanted an even bigger audience and influence.
Spencer coined the term “alt-right” for this purpose, in an effort to blur the relationship between white nationalism and white conservatism. He did this by creating nonprofit think tanks like the National Policy Institute that provided an academic veneer for him and other white supremacists to air their views on white supremacy.
This strategy worked.
Today, many white nationalist ideas once relegated to the margins of society are embraced by the broader conservative movement.
Take, for example, the great replacement theory. The conspiracy theory misinterprets the demographic shift as an active attempt to replace white Americans with people of color.
This baseless idea observes that blacks and Latinos are becoming larger percentages of the US population and paints this data as the result of an allegedly active attempt by anonymous multiculturalists to oust white Americans from power in an increasingly nation. diversified.
A recent poll showed that more than 50% of Republicans now believe in this conspiracy theory.
In 2016, during Trump’s presidential campaign, Vice Magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes formed the Proud Boys to promote alt-right goals by protecting white identity through the use of violence when necessary.
Members of the Proud Boys are affiliated with white nationalist ideas and leaders, but they deny any explicit racism. Instead, they describe themselves as “Western chauvinists” who believe in the supremacy of European culture but also welcome members of any race who support this idea.
Alongside pro-gun militias such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, the Proud Boys are an experiment in spreading white nationalist ideas to an online universe of potentially millions of social media users.
Why do people join these groups?
Data from manifestos posted online by white nationalist groups shows that many mass shooters share a few common characteristics: they are young, white, male, and spend a lot of time online on the same websites.
The alleged gunman in the murder of 10 black people in a predominantly black Buffalo neighborhood on May 14, 2022, described his motive as wanting to stop what he feared was the elimination of “the white race.”
His fears of people of color “replacing” white people stemmed from 4chan, a social media company popular among the alt-right.
In 2019, nine African-American church members were murdered in Charleston by a young white man who became radicalized through Google searches that led him to openly white supremacist content.
Massacres at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at a synagogue in Poway, California, all took place after the shooters began hanging out on 8chan, an image board popular with white supremacists and the QAnon House of Messages.
For many of these people, the most important part of their radicalization was not related to their family life or their personality quirks, but rather where they spent time online.
A multiracial democracy at stake
The reasons why men join groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – and even some liberal groups – are less clear.
A former Proud Boy member offered a reason: “They want to join a gang,” Russell Schultz told CNN on Nov. 25, 2020. “I do.”
Antifa is a loose group of generally non-violent activists who oppose fascism.
Other former members of extremist groups describe the search for camaraderie and friendship, but also racism and anti-Semitism.
But more than any other issue, racial demographic shifts provide recruiting opportunities for white nationalists, many of whom believe that by 2045, whites will become the minority in the United States.
As of July 2021, the most recent date for which statistics are available, the US Census Bureau notes that of an estimated population of 330 million US citizens, 75.8% are white, 18.9% are Hispanic, 13.6% are black and 6% are Asian.
What is also becoming clearer is that the spread of white nationalism endangers the idea of a democratic nation where racial diversity is seen as a strength, not a weakness.
Assistant Professor of Practice in Anthropology, Vanderbilt University
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