Deadly Paranoia: White America Has Been Radicalized And Prepped For Violence

On Sunday night, peaceful protesters in St. Louis marched to demand the resignation of Mayor Lyda Krewson after weeks of frustration. Despite a lack of violence, looting, or destruction of property, a couple reacted to the march by bursting out of their marble mansion brandishing a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun, pointed them at the crowd, and threatened them repeatedly. Luckily, there was no bloodshed, but the potential for mass casualties was incredibly high.

This comes on the heels of weeks of tense standoffs around the country, including scenes of armed white vigilantes roaming the streets with guns, bats, bows and arrows, and knives. They lined the streets in Crown Point, Indiana, holding rifles. Armed with weapons, counter-protesters in Brandenburg, Kentucky protected a Confederate monument. In New Mexico, a member of a militia shot a protester attempting to pull down a statue.

Of course, the Black Lives Matter protests have been largely peaceful. This doesn’t matter, however, as white Americans have been prepped for violence their entire lives and convinced they live in a dangerous dystopia where each passing second is another moment that could lead to unimaginable violence perpetrated by African Americans.

This is, after all, why America has more guns than people and a law enforcement system that brutalizes people of color.

Fearmongering is as old as America itself. The Indigenous people who lived on this soil well before us were turned into “savages” and made a deadly threat in order to expedite their removal and eradication. Enslaved populations were painted as threats to rise up and slaughter their masters and then come for the rest of the world in order to explain inhuman punishments, torture, and murder. The founding itself was predicated on a fear of uprisings and the need to forge a new government that could tackle any unrest.

With African Americans, this history is ugly and pervasive. Prior to the Civil War, Northerners used fear of freed slaves joining their ranks and attacking them as a reason to allow slavery to go unabated. Following the war, terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan and communities around American lynched, murdered, and tortured African Americans with impunity because whites feared their potential for violence. In the early 20th century, it was the rumor that African Americans were being manipulated by the burgeoning Communist Party that led to mass slaughter and harassment, and as the Civil Rights Movement grew in the middle of the century that fear again motivated Southerners and Northerners alike to harass and and fear African Americans.

The point is, none of this is new. What happened in St. Louis is only an exposure of what has long infected the body politic of the country come to the surface. It is the ugly reality of who we are and where we have been. Only now, in an era of twenty-four hours news, the internet, and conspiracy theory as a means of political strategy and financial profit, the infection grows worse and worse, not to mention potentially deadly, by the day.

This manipulation has been the political strategy of the Republican Party since the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson. With that passage, the GOP recognized the potential to use white backlash against the Democratic Party and has been pursuing that strategy for over five decades. It began with the so-called “Southern Strategy” by nominee Barry Goldwater and then President Richard Nixon. It continued with Ronald Reagan and mutated into “colorblind” policy, which sought to tell Americans that racism was over and done with it, its own form of toxic racism.

The GOP has found willing and anxious partners in crafting this alternate reality in the National Rifle Association, which has used racial paranoia to increase sales of guns and donations to record numbers, but also in Fox News, a cable outlet designed intentionally by Nixon consultant Roger Ailes to pump out nonstop white anxiety in order to help Republicans win elections.

Fox’s main narrative is a quiet, perpetual retelling of the New World Order conspiracy theory that claims shadowy cabals (almost always Jewish people like George Soros) are working in concert with traitors (American liberals) to manipulate people of color to destroy America. It is a fever-dream, paranoid madness that has defined much of the American story since the turn of the 20th century, but its roots go all the way back to the founding and the Civil War itself. What Fox has done is tell white Americans, both poor and wealthy, that people are coming for what they have and that we’re always on the precipice of a violent race war.

This message has been sounding loud and clear since 1996 and has grown so everpresent that it has convinced millions to be ready for blood in the streets.

It is this supposed potential for violence in people of color that necessitates the purchasing of semiautomatic weapons like the one brandished in St. Louis. It is this supposed potential for violence in people of color that necessitates exorbitant budgets for military-grade weaponry for police departments around the country while starving our schools and denying us infrastructure and healthcare. It is this supposed potential for violence in people of color that keeps white people in America ready, at a moment’s notice, to burst through their doors, armed to the teeth, and threaten to slaughter their fellow citizens.

There’s no other way to put it. These people live in a manufactured reality designed to keep them in fear and to keep them sending their money and offering their votes to the same people. You can laugh at them all you want, and perhaps you should, it is a ridiculous notion and they look patently absurd, but make no mistake, these people are ready to kill because they believe they live in a dystopian world where their lives depend on killing.

They’ve been told their entire lives that’s the case.

Kill or be killed.

And if you couldn’t already tell, they’ve made their decision.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.