How White Supremacy Went Mainstream In The US: 8chan, Trump, Voter Suppression [View all]

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Last edited Sun Aug 11, 2019, 06:33 AM - Edit history (1)

8chan, Trump, voter suppression: how white supremacy went mainstream in the US, Observer special report, El Paso shooting. The same anxiety that drives white supremacists has motivated Republicans to disenfranchise populations that don’t vote for them. The Guardian, Aug. 11, 2019.

Before he opened fire on an El Paso, Texas shopping center, killing 22 people and injuring dozens more, the accused gunman, Patrick Crusius, allegedly posted a manifesto online explicitly stating his motivation: he was trying to stop a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”. In April, another shooter attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and wounding three other people. In his a “manifesto” attributed to him, he claimed he was responding to the “meticulously planned genocide of the European race”.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, still another shooter attacked a synagogue that he chose deliberately because the congregation helped with refugee relocation. He wrote online that they were trying to “bring invaders in that kill our people”. The man who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year, called immigration an “assault on the European people”..

All of these shooters were obsessed with the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, sometimes referred to as “white genocide”. It’s the idea that shadowy elites – usually Jewish, almost always liberal – are orchestrating the destruction of white culture through demographic change. The theory goes that white culture will be eroded mainly through migration and birthrates: more people of color are arriving in majority white counties, the ones already there are having more and more babies, and birthrates are declining for the soon-to-be-oppressed white people.

But the fans of this theory, and the idea of a demographic threat to a white (male) hierarchical structure, are no longer the preserve of extremists that lurk in the netherworlds of the internet. White supremacy, and the ideas and motivations that drive it, are flourishing in plain sight in the US.
Most notoriously, Donald Trump has become a fan of “great replacement” talking points. In the last week many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have called the president a white supremacist. But Trump is far from being alone, and in recent years the idea has caught fire among more and more mainstream Republicans. The looming threat of their losing political influence permeates every move the party has made for decades.

Anxiety about racial decline has a long past, but this specific modern version of it comes from the French writer Renaud Camus, who was known in the 80s as a pioneering gay novelist. He coined the phrase “great replacement” in a 2011 book of the same name, articulating the conspiratorial idea the brown and black people are invading Europe to destroy white culture...https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/11/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-8chan-voter-suppression

**Related: 'IS TRUMP BUILDING A WHITE ETHNOSTATE?' Truthdig, Aug, 9, 2019.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/is-trump-building-a-white-ethnostate/

*Related: 'We cannot wait': experts urge US to fund fight against white extremism. Shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California, are being investigated by federal authorities as domestic terror attacks, The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/06/trump-fbi-far-right-domestic-terrorism