Dispatch #83 White Lesbian Age 68 Considers America's Domestic Terrorism

January 13th 2021   

1529 Days Post-Ascendency of White Supremacy & Misogyny Enforced by Resurgent Ennobling & Enabling of Domestic Terrorism

7 Days until the so-called peaceful transfer of power

So yeah, the live broadcast of domestic terrorists attacking the Capitol has stirred mainstream media/pundits and political leaders at last to describe the White-Supremacist-Misogynist-Pussy-Grabbing-Self-Aggrandizing-Demagogic-Bully-Illegitimate-PeeeOTUS for what he has always been, that is, the cultivator/inciter/panderer for our home-grown domestic terrorists, that is, White-Nationalist-Fascistic-Christian-Supremacist Americans.  

And yeah, white people are shocked SHOCKED at this spasm of vengeful outrage, at this rampaging mob determined to use violence, incited by lies about a stolen election. But do these shocked white people also grasp the incendiary premise implicit in #StoptheSteal? The sobbing mob member who reportedly cried out ‘they were supposed to shoot BLM people, not us!’ reveals the premise -- white people are entitled to riot to protect their white supremacist country against all threats of equality.

Black people couldn’t be more familiar with these domestic terrorists as, black Americans have lived this mob/structural terrorism 24/7 since the Civil War -- killing/lynching/raping for slightest efforts to exercise their equality with White Americans. The Traitor-Seditionist-Coup-Leader-in-Chief reassured these terrorists that ‘we love you, you are very special people, now you can go safely home.’ 

In her January 6^th 2021 piece in The Guardian titled “The violence at the Capitol was an attempted coup. Call it that,” Rebecca Solnit considers how to understand/frame the attack: 

It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, especially white male rage fueled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.

This violence comes from the white men who were long the only people with power in this country imagining themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because others might also have power and a voice. We saw these kind of men last summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital while carrying semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt

Now, in the name of national unity and reconciliation, we see the rush to decry the terrorists as ‘not who we are” and urge that ‘we can reclaim our country and protect the Constitution.’  We must deliberately reject sophomoric and propagandizing phrases like reclaim our democracy, protect the Constitution, and protect the Republic.  Words and language do MATTER. We must refuse these words that presume to urge/persuade that the Republic and Constitution are worthy of protection and reclamation.

To wit, Our Constitution was largely written by white slave-holding upper-class men who 1) endorsed the genocide of Indians and the stealing of their land, 2) limited democratic participation to land-holding white men, and 3) allowed the Constitution to count Black people/slaves as a commodity equal to 3/4 of a person. Our country was founded enslaving Black people; our Republic built on the genocide of native peoples and the dehumanization and violent exploitation of Black people.  

WE MUST RE-MAKE, RE-VISION AND RE-CREATE OUR COUNTRY.  RECLAIM CANNOT BE PART OF THIS WORK.  MOREOVER, SYSTEMIC AND SUBSTANTIAL REPARATIONS MUST BE FOUNDATIONAL TO THIS WORK.

White American domestic terrorism was formally unleashed by the infamous Compromise of 1877 whereby Northern and Southern politicians made Rutherford B Hays the president and withdrew federal troops from the Confederate South, thereby ending Reconstruction and abandoning black people to the blood-soaked maw of white supremacy on steroids  This is the lineage/through-line for the Traitor-Seditionist-Coup-Leader-in-Chief exhorting these 21^st Century domestic terrorists to fight for the absolute superiority of whiteness. 

During a blunt and expansive conversation with On The Media host Bob Garfield on January 8^th 2021, Kimberly Williams-Crenshaw identifies the Compromise of 1877 as a “catastrophe of appeasement” that effectively dignified the grievances of the Confederate South and forgave the treasonous attack on the Republic.  She urgently warns against Biden’s impulse/strategy of unity and reconciliation, i.e., let’s turn the page.  There can be no legitimate negotiation with white supremacy, no kumbaya moment without specific accountability.  The illegitimate grievances of 21^st century domestic terrorists must be specifically and explicitly condemned.  www.wnycstudios.org/story/why-appeasement-wont-work-time-around-on-the-media/ 

The 21^st Century enablers of domestic terrorism are operating in plain sight – McConnell and other Republican officials such as Cruz and Hawley are just upper-class versions of the people who felt entitled and encouraged to attack the Capitol. McConnell begin his campaign of incitement when he proclaimed on the first day of the Obama administration “I will block every action of this president.”  Republicans intent on consolidating power have used the same old strategy – when failing to address the common good for the benefit of the governed, make sure to cultivate the scapegoat, the “other,” the grievance of the gut. 

In her January 11^th 2021 piece in The Guardian titled “Anyone shocked by the US Capitol attack has ignored an awful lot of warning signs,” Francine Prose considers the origins of the attack.

It’s important to recall that Trump has been the accelerant but not the fuel, not the kindling that has allowed the flames of hatred and bigotry, of anti-democratic rightwing fanaticism to blaze as brightly as they do now. If these Trump loyalists believe – as they kept chanting – that the duly-elected, soon-to-be Biden-Harris administration is not their government, it’s not only because their president told them so. And the framed portraits, the statuary, the gleaming chandeliers they saw in the Capitol building were unlikely to change their minds. 

The interlopers on the Senate floor looked less triumphant than bewildered, and their bewilderment is not unrelated to the sources of their rage: the massive income inequality, the epidemic unemployment, the opioid and Covid pandemics, the sense of being excluded and forgotten that helps inspire xenophobia, racism, sexism and violence. The rapid decline of our public educational system and the rise of far-right media are not unrelated; among the things that education gives us is the ability to think, to distinguish the truth from the lie, to process and evaluate the information we’re given.

These are the problems and the perils that the Biden-Harris administration will have to deal with, and which all the palliative talk about unity, reconciliation, and “working across the aisle” is not going to come remotely close to fixing. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/11/us-capitol-attack-warning-signs-charlottesville-michigan

In her January 6^th 2021 Washington Post column titled “Flying the flag of fascism for Trump,” Robin Givhan sees the flags of the Confederacy flying high, dangerous and despicable and familiar. America has never reckoned with her history and legacy of slavery. Givhan concludes:

But what Trump has unleashed cannot so easily be controlled or pushed back. History is relentless. Hatred is fierce.

At nightfall, when law enforcement regained control of the Capitol, the lawmakers returned to their task of counting the electoral votes. So many of the provocateurs among them, the ones who had threatened to object to the will of the people, seemed chastened. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), newly defeated by Warnock, acknowledged a change of heart. But there was nothing to applaud here. No reason to cheer. As Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) noted, “The shame of this day is that it’s been aided and abetted by good Americans who are falling prey, who are choosing Trump over truth.”

Americans are choosing Trump over democracy.

The rioters want to wallow in the Confederacy. They want to be reborn under the flag of Trump. They want to live in an angry, polluted, heartless world, if only because it means that they get to stand victorious atop the whole, miserable mess. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/06/flying-flag-fascism-trump/

We must stop describing these mobsters as Trump supporters. These folks are domestic terrorists and they promote this political credo: White-Nationalist-Fascistic-Christian-Supremacists.