Thread by @JYSexton

We REALLY need to talk about how powerful white supremacists use conspiracy theories to destroy movements and provoke violence and crush dissent.

This history isn't taught and I didn't know until I started doing research on my book American Rule.

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penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

First things first: the underlying theme here is that for the entirety of American history the powerful and white supremacists have used conspiracy theories to undermine any actual protest, claiming it's an evil conspiracy instead of an actual, legitimate complaint.

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We could go back to the very Founding, but let's start with John Brown, an abolitionist who actually did intent to start a revolution by helping slaves rise against their masters.

His attack on southern slavery set off a paranoid period that enabled the Civil War.

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The Confederacy was a dystopia enabled by paranoid conspiracy theories that the North was engaged in massive conspiracies to undermine slavery. These weren't true, but succession was predicated on that fever dream fear.

That fascist country was founded on paranoia.

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The Confederacy saw itself as the bulwark against evil conspiracies against white supremacy. They believed they were God's chosen nation and God's champion of his planned white supremacist order.

Again, the CSA was a racist, Christian nation in action and theory.

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Following the Confederacy's fall, white supremacists claimed that African America success was part of a white conspiracy to undermine the South instead of personal and communal excellence.

The paranoia that enabled the CSA continued well after their defeat.

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The first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan was dedicated to terrorizing blacks, but also to seeking out white conspirators "manipulating" them.

It was an invisible army against an invisible, nonexistent threat, and saw freed slaves as objects of widespread manipulation.

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I want this to sink in. White supremacists do not believe African Americans are capable of agency. They saw slavery as a benevolent service, an act of affection, because they knew better than the slaves.

They truly believe African Americans are being used and manipulated.

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Skip forward to 1917 and the Russian Revolution. That uprising scared the hell out of Americans and made them vulnerable to conspiracy theories that communists were going to reach into America and manipulate minorities and the poor to foment their own revolutions.

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This led to the Red Summer of 1919, where riots broke out because white were terrified that African Americans were being manipulated by communists to stir revolts.

This was a period of disgusting violence and discrimination. Papers like the New York Times trafficked in it.

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For context, from 1882 to 1950 some five thousand African Americans were lynched or tortured to death in America, many of them as a message that uprisings or revolutions would not be tolerated and to curb what white supremacists saw as outside manipulation.

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The Red Summer was madness and has been more or less erased from the history books and curricula, but showed how white supremacists traffic in conspiracy theories to undermine legitimate civil rights protest and unrest.

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Of course, there's a long history in America of these practices, and no individual embodies that history than Joseph McCarthy, who used conspiracy theories to harass, intimidate, and purse minorities from government, including African Americans, women, and LGBTQ Americans.

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McCarthy is one of the most known conspiracy theorist white supremacists, but there were plenty of them and organizations like the John Burch Society that claimed communists were behind the Civil Rights Movement and every African American movement.

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I would be remiss, of course, if I didn't mention very quickly that one of the founders of the John Burch society, which pushed conspiracy theories and weaponized paranoia, was the father of the Koch Brothers, who created the Tea Party Movement and continued the work.

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To fully grasp how this was carried out, we must focus on Martin Luther King, who despite modern propaganda was hated, reviled, and targeted by white supremacist and state power with conspiracy theories that he was a communist agent and a traitor to America.

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Avowed white supremacists like Governor George Wallace labeled the Civil Rights Movement as a communist conspiracy to hurt America, carrying on the paranoid conspiracy theories that predicated the founding of the Confederate States of America.

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Neo-Confederate preachers like Jerry Falwell joined George Wallace, claiming that MLK was a communist agent and defying the word of the racist, Confederate God.

For those who want more on this, see my threads about the Cult of the Shining City.

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Southerners rioted against the Civil Rights Movement, many expressing that they actually loved African Americans and wanted what was best for them and that Communists were manipulating them, thereby robbing them of agency and the legitimacy of their movement.

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Again, this is important.

We view the Confederacy just as a rebel nation predicated on slavery. That is true, but it was also a nation founded on conspiracy theories of outside manipulation of African Americans and the idea that they were at war with those conspirators.

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Southerners cracked down on Civil Rights protestors not just because they didn't see them as human, but because they believed they were part of a giant conspiracy against them and acting as pawns of a Communist plot to hurt America.

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Civil Rights protestors were brutalized because they were seen as agitators, agents sent to cause unrest among the African American population white supremacists believed were happy and taken care of by their white supremacist overlords.

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But this conspiracy theory mindset wasn't just limited to the South. Government officials believed it as well.

J. Edgar Hoover, as FBI Director, saw the Civil Rights Movement as a communist plot, ordered it infiltrated and destroyed from the inside out.

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Joining Hoover was Richard Nixon, who actively believed and voiced his fear that minorities and young people were being manipulated by communists and Jews, which was a holdover from the conspiracy theories of the early 20th century and pre-war America and Nazi Germany.

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Another believer in these conspiracies was Ronald Reagan, governor of California, who based his political career on cracking down on what he saw as conspirators to destroy America and concerns that it was part of a giant plan to hurt the country.

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As president, Reagan would continually frame America as being under attack by evil forces, including the USSR, which he claimed was the focus of evil in the world.

He brought these conspiracy theories into the light and made them American reality.

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For more on Reagan and why he believed these supernatural conspiracies, see my threads on the Cult of the Shining City.

It is weird, bizarre, but also headshakingly true. It's how we got to this bizarre reality.

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Reagan's supernatural reality created a fear of a satanic conspiracy against America, that satanists and evil cabals were manipulating young people, causing unrest with minorities, and plunging America into a Christian End Times struggle. These ideas flooded the culture.

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Reagan had positioned the USSR as the focus of evil in the world, an echo of the years where white supremacist blamed communists for racial uprising.

When the USSR fell, however, Republicans and spiritual leaders needed a new focus of evil to fight and scapegoat.

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The new face of evil would come during Bill Clinton's presidency, when he finished H.W. Bush and Reagan's work on free trade and globalism.

This gave an opening to claim that liberals like Clinton were actually traitors, criminals, and in some rumors, satanic conspirators.

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In the tradition of fellow Neo-Confederate preacher Jerry Falwell, people like Pat Robertson claimed the spiritual war of the Cold War had continued, but that liberals were betraying America and possibly in league with satanic cabals determined to destroy the country.

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The New World Order conspiracy took the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fear of the USSR, consequences of economic globalism, and turned them into a conspiracy theory that claimed liberals were betraying America and working with Satan to destroy our sovereignty.

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Like past white supremacist conspiracy theories, the New World Order conspiracy told white Americans that minorities and the poor were being co-opted and manipulated by outside agitators, including Jewish people, in order to rise up and destroy America.

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Figures like Newt Gingrich, Wayne LaPierre, and Rush Limbaugh, leading the GOP and NRA, saw much profit to be had by stoking these white supremacist, New World Order fears. It gave them power, money, and influence over a paranoid white base looking for answers.

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Right Wing appeals to paranoia by promoting New World Order narratives met purchase with the burgeoning Patriot Movement, which saw white supremacy under attack and saw a need to declare war against "traitors" like Clinton and liberals in league with the conspiracy.

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Right Wing appeals to this paranoia and flirting with the Patriot Movement had disastrous results. Timothy McVeigh was part of this paranoia world and killed hundreds of Americans by bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

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The OKC Bombing wasn't just domestic terrorism. McVeigh believed he was fighting an invisible war against the NWO, or the conspiracy against white supremacy by Jewish people and traitors.

It was a 20th century assault on Ft Sumter, inspired by the same weaponized paranoia.

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Unfortunately, many of our mass shootings are continuations of this "invisible war," being fought by radicalized, paranoid white supremacist who still believe, like the Confederates, that conspiracies are targeting white supremacy by manipulating minorities.

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Donald Trump has intentionally campaigned as a warrior against these paranoid conspiracy theories. The Deep State is just the New World Order with a new coat of paint.

His entire political appeal is based on the same white supremacist paranoia that created the Confederacy.

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It's important to state: The Confederacy wasn't just a rebellion in the 19th century in the South. It's a state of mind, it's white paranoia bleeding into fascism. This is why the flags are everywhere. Because fascist white paranoia is everywhere.

It still survives.

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The conspiracy theories claiming George Soros (again, Jews manipulating minorities) are just a continuation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the New World Order.

America is gripped and possessed by the same white supremacist paranoia that started the Civil War.

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You'll find these same white supremacist paranoid conspiracy theories fueling movements like Qanon, who believe in shadowy, Jewish cabals running the world and manipulating minorities who aren't able to grasp what's happening.

It's white supremacy. Through and through.

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See it in instances like this. Where George Soros and shadowy cabals are creating crises, even faking the death of George Floyd.

It's about robbing black people of their lives while also robbing them of their agency and legitimacy.

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But it always comes back to this. The idea that the conspiracy is larger. It's about Satan and Jews attacking America and manipulating minorities against their best interests, their best interests as being being controlled by white people smarter and better than them

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Make no mistake, these conspiracy theories of the moment intended to legitimatize this movement are the same conspiracy theories that fueled the Civil War, the Red Summer, the attacks on the Civil Rights Movement, and the white supremacist terrorism of the 1990's.

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This isn't just a new phenomenon, it's another chapter in a long history of white supremacists in America using conspiracy theories to bolster white supremacy and frame African Americans as needing to be enslaved and controlled for their own good so they're not "used."

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A warning though: like in the Civil Rights Era, like during the Red Summer, like the Civil War, these conspiracy theories turn "enemies" into "terrorists."

And when that distinction happens, like Trump is trying, it creates dehumanization and enables murder.

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We have seen blood in the streets, lynching, mass showcases of fascism and white supremacist violence. It ALWAYS happens when they believe their power is endangered and when they turn protestors and individuals into "terrorists" and "traitors."

This is something to watch.

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The reason all of this seems bizarre is because we're not taught the real history. This stuff moves in cycles, and you can understand it if you realize it's all happened before.

These conspiracy theories, these Americans living in alternate realities, it's in our history.

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We're in a time of great hope and potential, but white supremacists and fascists resort to these conspiracy theories and violence in those times of hope.

Be careful. Learn the past so you can see what's happening in the present. Fight for change and be aware.

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