As suggested earlier, the rise and institutionalisation of the Ronald Reagan political clique, first in California as governor, 1967-1975, and then as U.S. President, 1981-1989, was a major green light for the development of white supremacist groups, from marginal and obscure to mainstream, by the dawn of the twenty-first century. Reagan and his cronies and political descendants were masters of the device that came be known as a “dog whistle,” using certain tropes and symbolic actions that telegraphed toxic white supremacy and anti-black racism. As Reagan’s “free market” economic and anti-union policies, accompanied by rapid de-industrialisation and job shrinkage, produced homelessness and insecurity of the most vulnerable, they also increasingly affected white workers, making them easy prey to the white nationalist and politicised evangelical groups that had their own narrative about the causes–big government (including mysterious black helicopters), secularisation, banks (always implicating jews), poverty programs (always identified with African Americans even though the majority of recipients were in fact white), and Mexican migrants and women taking their jobs.
-from Loaded by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Chapter 8, White Nationalism
Note: “Hick Fascism” is from Mark Ames: http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/newtown
Rant on.
-T
worstwriter 