Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

(thread)

Saying this as someone who has spent my fair share of time monitoring white supremacists: their animating fear is demographic shift ("replacement").

Omicron will to BURN through their undervaxxed enclaves.

They will read it as accelerated "replacement."

That's bad.

It's bad not because it will hurt their feelings (it will, but who cares) or because I feel sorry for them (they made their bed), but because it will intensity a lot of the thoughts and feelings that carry people towards violent fascism.

We know who they will hurt first.

Electeds on both side of the aisle have been strategizing around a shift to a white minority in the US for a long time, the GOP with voter suppression tactics and the Dems with "it's all sunshine from here" optimism that I remember well from the 2012 convention.

What neither party's establishment really seems to have taken into account, however-- even before the pandemic-- is how white racists are and are going to respond to that shift.

Spoiler: not well.

In case it isn't clear, I'm not arguing that the shift itself is bad.

In fact, I'm pretty gung ho about things that piss off organized racists.

What I'm saying is already bad and going to get worse is the inevitable intensification of white supremacist freak-out.

It's already pretty clear that the Dem establishment did not see US fascism coming despite all the warning signs (in retrospect, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party really should have been dead giveaways).

And I don't think they understand how COVID will impact its future.

We'll see raw numbers of reactionary white folks decline disproportionately from COVID death, because reactionary whites are a lot less likely to be vaxxed.

Census apportionment lag and the electoral college mean this won't have a proportional impact on elections, though.

You know who will see a huge immediate impact, though?

Reactionary whites.

They are going to see *other* reactionary whites dying and disabled all around them.

And they are going to call it white genocide.

These are the people calling COVID a cold right now, but they are either going to conveniently develop selective amnesia about that or say COVID was a cover story for a government [insert white genocide conspiracy theory here] effort.

My money's on the latter.

Either way, that's a recipe for intense white racist replacement panic.

It'll be because of tragedy they visited on themselves, but of course they aren't going to accept responsibility for that.

It's already a given that they'll blame the government; they always do.

The only question is, will they then decide to take it over, or will they decide to try again to overthrow it?

My money is again on the latter.

The sheer immediacy of watching friends/family die has tremendous radicalizing potential, and organized white supremacists have a ready-made way to make sense of senseless loss here.

No one will want to take responsibility for refusing a vaxx and then murdering grandma with a cough, so these folks will be looking for alternate answers.

"White genocide" will be an enormously appealing lie, and they are going to want revenge against the imaginary killers.

It's a recipe for the mainstreaming of accelerationist white supremacy.

Accelerationism (a politics of accelerating the fall of the existing formal power structure) is still mostly the domain of an internet fringe, but Trump and the 1/6 coup have helped popularize it.

In the far right, accelerationism tends to mean embracing a politics of terror and violence.

The idea is to use both direct and stochastic terror not with the aim of immediate takeover but with the aim of sparking civil war.

We are not ready for accelerated accelerationism within the far right.

Period.

Our law enforcement agencies aren't equipped to manage it even if they wanted to.

Neither party is planning for it.

White racists don't believe COVID will kill their loved ones.

When it inevitably does, they will look for an external culprit, even though it will be their own fault.

Organized white supremacists will be ready with a fascist lie that will make them feel better.

It's the simplest thing in the world to see.

It's already happening.

But I don't see anyone really talking about it.

White racists are going to read white COVID death as white genocide, and it will be radicalizing.

Radicalizing towards violence.

Trumpian fascism was a foreseeable reality we didn't plan for, and we know what happened when it caught us off-guard.

COVID death-linked white racist radicalization towards accelerationist fascism is coming next, and we should plan for it.

(the end)

*intensify, oops