Most journalism is fairly ephemeral, but some pieces of reporting stand the test of time because they accurately depicted important historical dynamics that few others perceived at the time. This is one of those impressive pieces that is worth revisiting. thisamericanlife.org/615/the-beginn…
It's worth it just for the opening 8 minutes where we hear tape of Breitbart editor Steve Bannon from 2014 (when almost no one knew his name) selling the hell out of a made up story about Mexican cartels who'd taken over entire counties in Texas. Just utter, shameless lying.
The journalist who conducted the Bannon interview then goes to a 2014 party in DC where he hangs out with Seb Gorka, Jeff Sessions, (probably) Steven Miller, and other people perceived to be totally fringe at that time.
He writes up the story but the high profile outlet that had solicited it says "no thanks, we're not going to publish it. Who cares about these totally irrelevant freaks?" Those totally irrelevant freaks, 3 years later, were running the country from perches in the White House.
As we now know (but which the people who made this 2017 podcast could not have known), Steven Miller was both working as a Jeff Sessions staffer AND funneling white nationalist propaganda to Breitbart for them to publish. splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019…
The journalist with which this podcast opens had, in 2014, infiltrated a cell of propagandists and political operatives who were trying to mainstream white nationalism. He sensed there was a story there. He had no idea how right he was.
When we look back at the 2010s in the future, I suspect that one of the key stories we'll tell is about how white nationalist ideas gained traction in right wing media from Beck to Limbaugh to Breitbart to Fox...and then how effortlessly those ideas came to define the GOP brand.
The mistake too many people made, and I will include myself in this category, is that they did not take this stuff seriously. They looked at racist immigration hawks like Tom Tancredo or Dave Brat (discussed in this podcast) as fringe freaks, racist holdovers from a dead past.
It's not like there weren't plenty of people, especially people of color who were directly impacted by this rising white nationalist culture, who weren't pointing this out at the time. The problem was that the folks with power and influence were not listening.
Why could we not hear it? I can think of no better way to explain it than this terrible scene from the 2012 film, Django Unchained. A scene that asks the audience to chuckle about how silly and dumb those KKK hicks are.
In 2012, as white people across America took pleasure in watching this scene of bumbling, dumb KKK members; white nationalism, murderous and hateful white nationalism that is not at all funny, was gathering its forces. It wasn't part of a pathetic past, it was very present.
Because too many white Americans thought white nationalism took the form of the toothless, illiterate hicks depicted in Tarantino's film, they overlooked the suit-wearing white nationalists like Spencer and Miller, and the glib pseudo-intellectuals like Bannon and Gorka.
They didn't expect to see white nationalists writing long journalistic pieces for Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller...but there they were. splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017…
They didn't expect that a guy who'd been grooming conservative journalists for decades would be running a secret email chain called "the daily hate." splinternews.com/leaked-emails-…
This is one of my favorite books on the philosophy of history. The point is that in every historical moment there are a wide array of possible futures that could come into existence. By definition, only one actually happens. google.com/books/edition/…
In any particular moment, no one can know with certainty what future will emerge. This is why historians are notoriously reluctant to make predictions. Because we know that a huge part of what it means to be human is to not know what the future holds.
All the same, in any particular moment there are people and movements who, in hindsight, we can see had insights into their moment that turned out to be quite prescient.
