Thread by @TJStiles_Author

Jesse James & Donald Trump: A thread.

Trump's reelection slogans come straight from the long history of white supremacy:
1) "Law & Order"
2) "Radical left governors & mayors"
3) "Protect the suburbs [from black people]"

Jesse James's life illuminates their meaning.
1/10

I'm not the great scholar of white supremacy, but I see a repeated pattern, including in Jesse James's life.

1) "Law & order" represents the *aggression* of white supremacy. Before the Civil War, the growing challenge to the slaveholders' dominance bred aggressive demands.
2/10

The proximate cause of the Civil War was the demand for *more* by slaveholders—especially new territory. Proslavery militants in Missouri (home of Jesse James, born 1847) organized "Border Ruffian" paramilitary units to force slavery on the neighboring Kansas Territory.
3/10

2) "Radical left mayors/governors": White supremacy is intolerant of dissenting opinion. In the 1850s, the border-ruffian movement focused much of its wrath on *Missourians* deemed insufficiently proslavery (let alone on the few suspected abolitionists).
4/10

The resulting political repression of dissenting opinion within Missouri in the late 1850s starkly polarized secessionists & Unionists, which explains how a slave state with few abolitionists fell into a vicious internal Civil War, an irregular conflict between Missourians.
5/10

Frank and Jesse James—slaveholders—were Confederate guerrillas who participated in the worst atrocities in American history. Yet they fought entirely against fellow Missourians in the Civil War, trying to politically cleanse the state. White supremacy brooks no dissent.
6/10

3) "Protect the suburbs [from black people]":
Despite its aggression, white supremacy wreaths itself in an ideology of victimization, claiming a defense of hearth & home against invading outsiders—always cast as people of color or those who would "pollute" the white race.
7/10

Just as general Lost Cause mythology distorts secessionist aggression into victimization, Missouri's rebels—defenders of Jesse James & James himself—recast their war as one of a pure-hearted defense of Missouri farms against invading, rampaging Kansas abolitionists. A lie.
8/10

After the war, secessionists mixed racist appeals (see this major western Mo. newspaper) with a myth of victimization. Jesse James helped write that myth, justifying himself as a victim of Radical Republicans even as he robbed & killed. He mobilized rebels to retake power.
9/10

Are these commonalities between Trump's white supremacy and past iterations structural? I don't know. Maybe it's a coincidence, or common to other political movements. But the echoes are clear, not muddled. This program has worked before. My lecture:
10/10
c-span.org/video/?429297-…

My biography, "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War," is also a history of the Civil War & Reconstruction in Missouri. It had to be to explain JJ; he was always a fugitive (no diaries). It's in paperback:
barnesandnoble.com/w/jesse-james-…
And as e-book, & audio:
amazon.com/Jesse-James-T-…