Dr. William Horne

1) Nearly a year later, the state has still failed to meaningfully punish those who carried out the deadly 1/6 assault on the Capitol, much less punish its organizers in Trump, Bannon, Guiliani, Christopher Miller, Josh Hawley, etc.

Why does this matter? White backlash mvmnts rely on a collaboration btwn vigilantes & the state. We see this most clearly in the local nature of coup attempts during Reconstruction & Jim Crow. Lawmakers encouraged supremacist violence & legitimized participants.

From the “Liberty Place” & Wilmington coups in the 19th century to the and St. Louis, Tulsa, Orangeburg, and Greensboro massacres & suppressionist violence of the 20c, white vigilantes & state actors worked hand-in-hand.

This pattern defined the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, during which cops & vigilantes worked together to beat the shit out of protesters, since legitimized in the Rittenhouse verdict. Rather than interrupt this alliance, Dems allowed it to metastasize.

2) Republicans have further rigged an already antidemocratic system to cement white power indefinitely, passing state-level voting restrictions & redistricting following the Wisconsin model of minoritarian rule.https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1466772679109885957?s=20 …

Why does this matter? The ethnonationalism & white supremacy of the GOP are unpopular, & Dems have reasonably relied on that unpopularity to win office & keep the very worst bad actors from winning power.

After finding that the piecemeal suppressionist efforts & institutional means of overturning the 2020 election insufficient, Republicans have expanded both.

Finally, Republicans are in the midst of an “anti-CRT” campaign making it illegal to criticize white supremacist structures, even historically, in classroom & state agencies, again leaving Dems w/o recourse after GOP sabotage.

In short, the system they created is incredibly thorough, designed to prevent fallout from suppression. It MIRRORIS PRECISELY the tactics white supremacists used to create & affirm via SCOTUS an apartheid state from the 1890s through the 1960s in the U.S.

This means that unless Dems pass & implement federal legislation (like yesterday, tbh) addressing this 3-pronged attack on democracy, 2022 or 2024 will likely bring the final death of multiracial democracy.

3) Finally, mainstream reporting & public discourse continue to treat the GOP as a legitimate party & “bipartisanship” as a legitimate end.

Why does this matter? The “bipartisan” descriptions of the GOP assault on democracy as, for ex, “polarization,” hide the ways that the GOP has radicalized over the last 40 (& esp 10) yrs.

Refusing to acknowledge GOP radicalization (not to mention the proliferation of online right wing misinformation) makes it difficult for most Americans to understand the causes of our current crisis.

Historically, the most violent white supremacist backlashes occurred in response to multiracial organizing like we saw in 2020 that led “mainstream” & “centrist” forces to align with white reactionaries in the name of “civility.”

We see that most clearly during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Red Summer, & Massive Resistance, during which white vigilante & state forces meted out mass violence while white elites found new ways to rig the system.

This white "moderatism" seeks power in preserving or reestablishing a white consensus politics by undermining critique of the "bipartisan" white consensus as inherently illegitimate.

A much longer thread on that dynamic here, but the nutshell is that from legacy to social media, our information networks are owned & operated by those literally invested in the white consensus.https://twitter.com/wihorne/status/1458049464921427981?s=20 …

Perhaps Dems & legacy media simply haven't learned the "lessons of the last 4 yrs" or whatever. Maybe. But the behavior fits a specific pattern of historic white backlashes that put those outside the "white consensus" in mortal danger.

Civil wars are miserable & horribly deadly, but they usually carry the potential for a better, more equitable future. Unless we change course dramatically & right away, the current white backlash leaves little room for that hope. /end

First, I'm not going to lock the account despite the baddies bc the whole point is that the situation we face is extremely fucking dire. People need to know that. I'll be OK, but again, plz do report the baddest little baddies.

And on to their Very Serious Critiques. 1) No, the existence of an optional course at a university you choose to attend for grad school is not "indoctrination," nor is reading abt things that happened & discussing them—which is what the course actually consists of.

What is *actual* indoctrination is demanding that courses like this, which do raise serious questions abt existing systems of power, be banned. But thanks for this trip into the Upside Down!

2) Threatening someone for using the term "white backlash" makes you look like a by, as noted above, actually illustrating a key suppressionist element of historical & ongoing white backlashes. Nice work!

3) No, the existence of Black, Latinx, or other white backlashers of color doesn't mean it's not a white backlash. In fact, every white backlash in U.S. history involved either a realignment of "whiteness" or a collaboration w/Black & other racialized elites.

Did Confederate Cherokees support, idk, "inclusion?" No, they supported proximity to power--to the white supremacist state & its regime of slave-capital. https://lsupress.org/books/detail/confederate-cherokees/ …