Hey, everybody.
This is another content warning.
Three in a row, which means I think I get a prize.
The prizes. No ad money.
Oh, God.
Anyways, this is a video on a very important topic.
It does tap into my research on the American far
right and violence against people who are LGBTQ.
Plus, you can give this video a pass or you can come back to it later.
But, you know.
Just wanted to get that out ahead of time.
So not long ago, 31 men were arrested
attempting to disrupt a pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
These people were armed with riot shields, shin guards, at least one smoke grenade
arriving at what was essentially like a celebration event.
And they were members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front.
Furthermore, in Alameda County, California, a drag queen story time
our was interrupted by a group of people
who seemed to be members of the proud boys.
We'll get into them in just a moment.
But essentially, they showed up, screamed a bunch of homophobic slurs, had T-shirts
that essentially called for the killing of people who dress in drag.
And yes, and very much the definition of terrorism, because it does seem that
there's a new obsession for the American right right now.
They seem to have gotten bored of critical race theory,
and they're no longer that interested in pretending the kova doesn't exist.
So now their focus is essentially a full on moral
panic against the existence of LGBTQIA people.
For example, Representative Magic Taylor GREENE.
Sorry, Marjorie The Gathering.
Now, Marjorie Taylor GREENE
basically said that it should be illegal to take children to drag shows.
This was further pushed up
by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who claimed that he was going to use
Child Protective Services against parents who took their kids to drag shows.
And there's been more than one case, but there's been at least one public case
of a preacher in Boise who made the claim that basically LGBTQ
people should be able to mask off, basically said they should be killed.
And if you've been following far right influencers
and right wing media right now, you would know that they are essentially
in a full on obsession with lgbtqia+ people at the moment.
The main thing that they have been doing
is trying to tap into the homophobic myth of groomers.
The idea that basically all LGBTQ plus people are somehow secret pedophiles,
you know, basically
they're just taking the sort of fervent that was kicked up over a Q and on
and trying to give it a little bit more of a, you know, acceptable brush over.
So what's going on?
Why is the typical conservative media having this freak out over LGBTQ
plus people?
And what are these far right terrorist groups doing?
Essentially trying to take it to the next level?
And that's why we're going to talk about today.
First of all, we should probably talk about what I mean
by when talking about conservatives and the far right conservatives
are very much your standard Republican uncle.
Variety of people, your right wing of the American political spectrum,
which is vast and goes to a lot of wacky places.
But at the end of the day, they're not like actual terrorists
who want to create a white ethno state on the far right.
You have people who are actual terrorists who do want to make an actual white
ethno state.
Their primary point of organization came in the late seventies, in 1979.
So basically happen is in 1979, a bunch of disparate hate groups that had
either ambivalence or outright antagonism toward each other came together
and they decided to work together towards common goals.
These are groups you're probably familiar with this groups like the Ku Klux Klan,
groups like the neo-Nazi Party, the Nazi Party of America,
I believe it's actually officially called.
But there's a bunch of neo-Nazi groups in America and groups like Skinheads
and they all and of course,
white supremacist Christian sects like identity Christians and such.
And they decided to work under a single banner for singular goals,
which is to create that white ethno state.
And this movement, which is very decentralized and has a whole bunch of very
clever ways that they communicate and coordinate without having
a central leadership is collectively called the White Power Movement.
I made enough videos about this that it is now
typecasting my entire channel and probably why I'm making this video right now.
So you want to watch that?
You can totally do it. Later on the 1990s.
This would come to incorporate new groups like the militias
and groups like, you know, anti-tax protesters and things like that.
And would more or less peak at the Oklahoma City bombing,
but have been were on the decline during the Bush years,
but have come back in a very big way, starting sort of with Obama's election
and really, really coming into power during the Trump administration
and now are sort of at an interesting crossroads in their history.
So that's the white power movement.
And that's I'll be referring to I refer to the far right.
The problem, though, is that the white power movement
have a lot of extremely controversial, takes on pretty much everything.
And so recruiting new people into their ranks is kind of hard.
It's kind of hard to get people to just be open racists even.
In this day and age where now if you're caught being an open racist,
you can just say you're a victim of cancel culture.
So what they tend to do is latch on to something that is popular
in the reactionary zeitgeist of American discourse
and try to use it as an opportunity to recruit
new white people into their supremacist groups.
And luckily, they have no
shortage of reactionary, fueled moral panics
to go with in American history, because American history is almost defined
by a series of moral panics, just so that we're all on the same page.
A moral panic is the idea that there is some sort
of violation of a social order being done by evil people.
This is typically not a real connection, or if there is any connection,
it's extremely overblown or the connection is drastically overplayed.
Or more likely,
the thing that they are saying is bad is not actually bad,
and that the people that they are trying to blame are usually just marginalized.
Basically, the moment
when society decides that they have a common concern over an issue.
If you ever find out about a group of people being turned into a debate.
Like, say, the trans debate.
That is when, you know,
a moral panic is happening and they get perpetrated by a group
that us sociologists who study this called moral entrepreneurs.
These are media figures, politicians, spiritual leaders, those kinds of things.
And as I said, the white power movement has used this many times
in American history to advance and recruit.
Let's just hear a few of them, shall we?
We've got critical race theory.
Confederate monuments.
Donald Trump.
Just name the day.
Gamergate. Islamaphobia.
Fear of Immigrants.
Gun Control Panics. Satanic Panics.
Vietnamese refugees trying to fish for shrimp
or just the concept of black civil rights.
So you can probably tell that, like in American history,
there's always some kind of moral panic going on at any given time.
You just have to kind of see which thing is being latched on to.
And in this case, the fact that anti LGBTQ bigotry
has a clothing of acceptability in some circles.
Still, it's much easier for, say, someone in the white power movement to say
that they don't want their kids associating with them LGBT and TS
While , you know, saying the same about, say, black and brown
people would get you a few more second looks.
White power men are also very locally focused.
They are always trying to find new ways to recruit.
So they're looking at local issues.
They're also looking at big picture right wing media.
One example
is that the creator of Stormfront,
his son, who has left the white power movement, has talked
about how his family all watch Tucker Carlson and take notes.
But basically, these groups around the country
keep track of what's going on and right wing media figure out what people are
panicking about, as well as following what's going on
and what kind of freak outs are happening in their local community.
And they use both to try and recruit.
And so turning people into a debate opens a window for them to have conversations
about the dehumanizing of people, which they can then expand into further areas.
And they are always on the look for a new open window.
And so what's going on lately is that this panic over LGBTQ
plus people just existing in public
has given them a big old bay window for them to open up and check out.
Mostly because the Republicans have decided that they are going to use
anti LGBTQ rhetoric as part of their election platform to
further cement their complete domination of Congress.
That's going to happen this November,
and they will always focus on people who are marginalized.
There's a reason why they're attack on LGBTQ.
Plus, people are focusing on drag queens and trans people
and not focusing on, say, gay celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris.
The more casually society can dehumanize a group of people, the better.
What they want to do is create an incident where they, the white power people
in their nice polo shirts and khakis, are getting into violent
confrontations with people who look visibly like they are the other.
And, you know, drag queens and trans
people of the LGBTQ community are the most visible.
And so having the imagery in the media of, you know, these wild,
sharp, dressed, young white men
having at it
with trans people is an image that they can use to recruit on.
And it is one that a certain segment of the American conservative base
will find curious and push them down the rabbit hole of radicalization.
So what happened in San Francisco and in Kurdistan, you can interpret
rightfully as publicity stunts.
They are trying to create visible incidences
where they can show that they are there and that they are resisting
the people that the right are currently freaking out about.
They're also trying to get more mainstream recognition
because they've got quite a lot of repair work to do.
This is all sort of like spoilers for a video
that I'll be making sometime in the future.
But essentially there was a major crisis for the American far right.
There was this point where they were getting mainstream acceptance
and we're pretty much entering fascism into the mainstream of American politics.
But then in 2017, Charlottesville happened and people saw that
all of their, you know, well dressed Nazis that were getting profiled
by The New York Times were shouting anti-Semitic slurs
in downtown Virginia
with tiki torches and then ended up murdering a woman.
All of that stuff made your conservative uncles
too uncomfortable with associating with them.
So you'll notice that by the next big event where the far
right came out in big numbers, which was the January six insurrection,
they notably did less of the like, open
racial slurs, an open white supremacist language.
So, you know, there were fewer Klan robes and swastikas at January 6th.
And even then, January six also made a bad taste.
In a lot of conservatives mouths, and the proud boys were there in decent
numbers.
And so this might be them also trying to rehabilitate their image.
First of all, they haven't been active in violent way in the public
in about a year,
and they've had a lot of internal drama that sort of held them back.
So this is their maybe trying to reenter the stage.
But at the same time, they want to reenter mainstream
right wing acceptance after being associated
with the insurrection and everything that makes sense.
But you have to think about it a little bit, is
why are the white power movements so obsessed with gender?
These are white supremacists, right?
Not male supremacists.
Well, here's the thing.
They are all, at the end of the day, fascist movements.
And one of the defining characteristics of fascism is having a strong and rigid
hierarchical idea of what gender is and a centralizing
many of the aspects of who you are to define your role in society .
So someone who is trans or people who, you know, are non-binary, it would be a very
dangerous to their totalizing worldview.
And it's not just like the American far right.
You see this and you see a very strong gender
discrimination in many far right groups, including like the Taliban.
They see gay rights, immigration, interracial contact,
and especially the birth of interracial children, feminism
and several other social movements as all being a problem
because they believe that those things will undermine the white birthrate.
They see those as apocalyptic threats that are somewhat interchangeable
and a larger project of protecting and preserving whiteness itself.
So given that, how scared should we be?
My answer is fairly.
The temperature of the extremists is rising.
We're seeing more and more fusion between the far right
and the mainstream right wing media.
Think of your Tucker Carlson, for example, who are laundering far right
talking points for a mainstream conservative audience or new networks
like Oann, which is a sort of far right
mouthpiece, but is couching itself
in the trappings of journalism
that is made for a more mainstream conservative audience.
And we can see that this is having an effect.
White power ideas are metastasizing in the American public to the point where
somewhere between ten and 30% of Americans are sympathetic to their views .
And unfortunately, the solution would be some sort of public policy.
But America's political system is deeply broken, and next election
is possibly going to be the least democratic election in American history.
And Republicans are planning to straight up try and claim,
no matter how it turns out, that they won.
So next election might be next presidential election, I should say,
is going to be an absolute nightmare for the future of democracy.
And it could be that America's democracy stands in the balance in that election.
And because, you know, this is Tristin, the person who won't shut up.
I have like a broad range of suspicions on where this might go.
The most mild, because I don't think that there's
going to be a reversing of this rhetoric anytime soon.
I think that identity based violence is on the increase,
and that's not a thing that we're going to be able to address right away.
So I do think that an increase in terrorism and violence is going to be
the norm in the United States for a while at least.
So the most mild outcome
I could see is something akin to what's called the years of lead in Italy,
which was this period where basically fascist and communist
guerrillas were doing acts of violence against each other
and against the government all across the country.
Both of them are being propped up by different interests.
You know, you had Operation Gladio with the United States
supporting the far right terrorists
and the Soviet Union giving clandestine support to the far left terrorists.
And the result was a period in Italy
where there was just a whole lot of high profile killings and murders and violence.
Worst case scenario, especially if the next presidential
election really goes down in an ugly way, could be,
I hate to say this, but possible civil war.
That's a far off scenario, I believe.
But the scary part is that it's less far off than it has been in a very long time.
What was I doing?
Like the oh well fingers for that.
And this also shows like looking at the role that media play is that hate
speech is an extremely important thing to be aware of.
It's not as innocent as people seem to think it is.
In the U.S., the First Amendment protects you from pretty much
all consequences for saying horrific things.
The thing is that there's actually not as much of a difference between, say,
you know, the places where free speech is covered, news like shouting fire
in a crowded theater and say constantly ramping up anxiety
that these marginalized people's mere existence.
Is a threat to the social order.
So, you know.
Cancel everybody, I guess.
I don't know.
Actually, if you want something that you can actually do,
there are a few things that you can try and get involved with.
For example, if you are in the United States,
do you know that a lot of this is happening at the local level?
It's not all like, you know, high level national news, all that kind of stuff.
There is a lot of stuff happening at the ground level.
And if you do have some time volunteering
to counter these messages, very, very important
because there's a lot of places where a lot of left
wing activists don't really go, but right wing activists do.
So, you know, volunteer at your local library where they are
having these drag storytime hours to make sure that they are safe.
Or say, go to school board meetings where they have angry
parents yelling about critical race theory and go there and correct the record.
These places have become sites of confrontation, and if we are not there
to protect the marginalized, then the right will show up.
Because the right always shows off.
The other unfortunate but very, very important thing is
that we need to be paying attention to these people because it's very easy
in the case of dealing with the far right to lose the forest for the trees
and make the claim that there are all of these individual groups
and individual personalities and are all sort of
working on their own plans and our imaginations
and are getting involved with different things around the country
and know that that is partially a media narrative
and partially an intentional project on their end to coordinate a far
right movement without having centralized leadership.
And so to know that the Proud Boys and Patriot Front and the Boogaloo Boys
and like all of these different groups together, are coordinated
without having a centralized leadership, but they are working towards
the same goals, they are watching the same news, they are using
the same arguments and attacking the same victims.
Academics and journalists
have spent too much time on the differences between these groups
when actually all of these groups are part of the same social movement,
the same groundswell of activity on the far right.
And if there's an important thing that we need, like
in the mainstream of the U.S., to realize that this isn't just a bunch
of singular acts of shooting, this isn't a bunch of small groups
around the country, that there is coordination,
there is a bigger groundswell happening, a groundswell that needs to be stopped.
This movement is very much the cancer of democracy,
and if we are not aware, it could grow and become malignant.
That was a horrible note.
And on like Sharon subscribe they're also trying
to get more mainstream recognize Asian Americanization.