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1. This article depicting a rising tide of explicit and aggressive white nationalism in small town Pennsylvania spoke to me as someone who grew up in the 70s & 80s in this sort of place. nytimes.com/2019/03/15/us/…
2. The generalizations I'm going to make in this thread are based on what I see on Facebook from my HS acquaintances. The town I grew up in was conservative, but Democratic. It's now very conservative and 70/30 GOP.
3. The town was virtually 100% white when I grew up there. It's now about 97% white. It was not a hotbed of racial progressivism then or now...but I never encountered avowed white nationalism or white supremacy when I lived there.
4. As the only Jewish kid in the school (and one of the few who would have been marked as ethnically 'other'), I would probably have been the one to encounter it if it did exist. Perhaps it was there and hidden from me, but if so, it would have been pretty marginal.
5. But as this NYTimes article shows (and as my experience on FB would suggest), things have changed a bit in small town PA. But I want to be precise about what I think the change is, because it's both more limited & also more scary than one might think.
6. When I say it's more limited, what I mean is that the overwhelming majority of Trump voting folks from my HS cohort do not have much explicitly political stuff on their FB feeds. Most are single issue (generally pro-life or pro-gun) voters.
7. These are not folks who are all that interested in politics, but they vote and they generally vote Republican these days. There's probably little chance of them ever voting D, but they do not spend their days thinking about the themes that animate modern day white nationalism.
8. But of the folks from my HS cohort who *do* post political stuff (and that's maybe only 10-20%), it's generally pro-Trump stuff that is pretty out there...like Q out there, like "2nd Amendment remedies" out there.
9. Much (but not all) of what they repost comes from the FB page run by the county's GOP. This site posts videos like this very well-produced piece of nuttiness (viewed by 1.6 million people so far).
10. It's filled with content like this. 
11. That FB page is half propaganda (the occasional Charlie Kirk meme, dozens of AOC hit pieces, etc.) and half Get Out the Vote efforts promoting candidates for local office and announcing ways to get involved with their campaigns.
12. A few of the folks who share things from the county GOP page also share things that are too outre even for that country GOP (which has evinced few scruples about circulating disinformation/propaganda). Like this Q video, for example.
13. This Q video promises the viewer that the people responsible for all of their problems (mostly politicians and economic 'elites' coded as Jewish) are about to be "permanently eradicated from the earth." Nice passive voice there, eh?
14. I played little league baseball with the person who shared that Q video. I don't think they or any of their friends have the capacity, will, or desire to engage in large-scale political violence....unless, they are called upon to do so by leaders they respect and trust.
15. They are the target audience for statements like this from Trump, testing the waters. The audience for the county's GOP page are being groomed to respond to just such an invitation should it be issued.
16. How many times does one have to hear that the opposition party is an enemy of the people before one starts to believe that it is a patriotic duty to engage in holy violence to save the nation?
17. How many times do your trusted political leaders have to tell you that we are being "invaded" and it is our duty to repel the invaders, before you take that to mean it's time to grab your gun and get on the front lines?
18. How many times do your trusted political leaders have to tell you that "the other side" wants a violent revolution before you believe it is your duty to violently "protect yourself" from them?
19. All of the images in this thread have been taken from the GOP facebook page (liked by >4000 people) of the county in which I grew up. But the same story could be replicated in many different places, like Oregon where I now live, for example.
20. Or Nebraska where an avowed white supremacist who expressed murderous desires was working for the GOP governor.
21. Or Washington where an organizer of the Charlottesville Nazi rally is a county-level official for the state GOP. mynorthwest.com/1011333/james-…
22. The slow and steady radicalization of the grassroots GOP is ***THE*** story of the past four years. The story does not begin in 2015...it has deep roots...but the MAGA phenomenon gave new focus and energy to a bundle of resentments that have the potential to do real harm.
23. That real harm might involve especially unhinged individuals engaging in acts of violence like we saw in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and with the CNN pipe bomber. That would be terrible, but ultimately such individual acts do not pose an existential threat to the constitution.
24. The harm that concerns me even more is the sort of harm that could come when it is invited and authorized by one of the nation's two major parties. That is why the words used by leaders like Trump, all the way down to the county level, matter.
Addendum: Looking back at that county-level GOP page I can't stress enough how weird it is to see 50% of be standard "vote for this smiling respectable-looking white person for county clerk" and 50% be "OMG, grab your guns cause the baby-killing commies are coming to get them!"
Last addendum: This is the perfect example of why leaders' words matter. Trump and his media enablers have helped cultivate a community of folks who believe this dangerous crap.
Here's a thread from last year about Facebook and the way I saw it fostering epistemic closure amongst my conservative FB friends.
