Do we believe that Brien James’ endeavors now are any different from his last five renditions of white nationalism? This man has been in versions of explicit fascist movements for 30 years, remaking himself to fit the times. It seems dangerous and risky to give him a platform in the local paper with no context of who he or what this movement is.
James is a case study in how fascist movements rebrand and try to stay relevant in mainstream culture. He is just one of many, but he just happens to be the one I lived by. When the shaved heads and white power tattoos stopped doing the trick of recruiting young kids, they changed up the game. They took a tip from Richard Spencer and cleaned up to make themselves part of the contemporary political landscape — but their views are still very much the same, repackaged and reworded. White nationalists change their look and language to stay ahead of the backlash. When we don’t look at the full picture, when we don’t educate each other about these movements and mutations, and, frankly, when we try to pretend that they are far removed from us — we are letting them get ahead.
We tend to want to believe that white supremacists and white nationalists are the backwoods Deliverance rejects of our society. However, over and over again our desire to paint ourselves as different means we don’t manage to reject them at all because we are letting them sneak in. The far-right is not dumb: Racism is not a result of ignorance, it’s the result of people seeking to manipulate power in their favor.
These movements are complex and their recruitment is a methodologically confusing and skillful strategy of memes, internet culture, normalizing violence, jokes and swearing they don’t mean what they say, pseudo-intellectualism, and insisting that they are part of the political spectrum. James may have nearly killed someone for not Sieg heiling in 2000, but in 2020 he knows you should never ask someone to do a Nazi salute at the first meeting. You’ve gotta ease into it.
The entire strategy of the alt-right in the last four years is evident in their name. They no longer want to be seen as extremists, they want to be considered a legitimate alternative on the political spectrum. That opportunity was offered to them through Trump as well as through press outlets from NPR to Fox to the Indianapolis Star each of which has conducted interviews with people who explicitly want a white ethnostate as if it were part of canonical political discourse.
I’m not a journalist and don’t know much about it: I’m just a mom who lived next door to a neo-Nazi and who knows what that does to communities like mine. I am not asking for journalists to be activists, but if the Indianapolis Star and other publications provide a platform without putting people like Brien James in context, and if people in my community continue to focus on outdated tropes without looking harder, then these movements grow and grow and grow until…Well, this week we saw what happens when we let it grow.
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