Vanity Fair - JANUARY 6 WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING
JANUARY 6 WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING
To Trumps true believers, the insurrection was an act of faith, Ashli Babbitt is a martyr, and white is not only a race, but a spiritual state.
BY JEFF SHARLET
JUNE 22, 2022
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/trump-ashli-babbitt-christians
I ping-pong between the front of the rally and the back, the rhetoric and the action. Ashlis mother tells the crowd to be proud Americans. Be proud white Americans! She goes on to list other races she feels should be proud Americans, too, but shes hard to hear over Kelli and Freedom shrieking.
Toward the back, a livestreamer named Julius is providing commentary. Shes right, he tells his camera. Slavery, slavery, slavery, he says, imitating his imagination of the nerdy voice of a leftist. No one got time for all a that. Julius is Black; hes wearing a Saviors T-shirt, with bleached-white Lady Liberty.
Image may contain Symbol and Flag
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF SHARLET.
Julius is not alone as a man of color in this crowdtheres Jorge Riley, and a Black Second Amendment speaker. I meet nearly as many self-identified Latino people as white ones. Nearly all want it known that patriots are more diverse than liberals think. This is true. And yet the crowd cheers for proud white Americans not because they are blind but because they want to beto believe in what historian Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, calls the promise of whiteness offered to people of color willing to collaborate with white supremacy. This bait and switchthe mythical promise of whiteness is unfulfillablemay be the next American contribution to fascism. Purification projects have become impractical for a nation in which the rightist ascendency can contend for the loyalty of a third of Latinx voters. Now, white supremacy welcomes all. Or at least a sufficient veneer of all to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and kung flu and Black crime and replacement theory somehow dont add up to the R-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in reverse, against white people. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by whiteness but by that of which it is made: their belief in a strongmanTrumpand their desire for an iron-fisted God, and their love of the way guns make them feel inside, and their grief over COVID-19, and their denial of COVID-19, and their loathing of systemic as descriptive of that which they cant see, cant hold in their hands and weigh, and their certainty that children are being taken, stolen, if not in body then in spirit, indoctrinated to hate themselves. They are drawn together by their love of fairness, which is how it used to be, theyre certain they remember, or, if theyre too young, theyve been told. And yet, slavery, slavery, slavery, murmurs the past. It gets to be too much, sometimes, Julius laments.
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Long worthy read!