{"id":142464,"date":"2025-05-29T21:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/142464\/"},"modified":"2025-05-29T21:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:58:08","slug":"a-cynical-ploy-to-hold-power-how-the-us-right-has-exploited-racial-division-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/142464\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A cynical ploy to hold power\u2019: how the US right has exploited racial division | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the year 1968, a group of housewives in Dearborn, Michigan<\/a>, then a nearly all-white suburb of Detroit, gathered for a workshop on how to shoot a gun. The women at the pistol range, mostly late-middle age and grandmotherly, were reacting to rhetoric from Richard Nixon\u2019s presidential campaign, which fixated on a so-called crime wave. They were scared, defensive, willing to pick up a gun as a guard against what Nixon called \u201ccities enveloped in smoke and flame\u201d.<\/p>\n

The neighboring city of Detroit was 40% Black, and the \u201ccrime\u201d supposedly overtaking US cities meant, in this context, Black people, and white suburbia\u2019s racist fear of them. Nixon knew this, though he didn\u2019t say it outright \u2013 \u201cYou have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,\u201d he once said, as quoted in the opening minutes of White with Fear, a new documentary<\/a> on decades of Republican<\/a> political strategy to stoke and manipulate white racial resentment.<\/p>\n

As White with Fear immediately makes clear with footage of the old ladies with their pistols braided into clips of contemporary Republican \u201cmigrant crime\u201d soundbites, the political tradition of dog-whistling white fear remains strong. The only difference between Dearborn housewives with, as a 1968 newscaster put it, \u201csuburbia\u2019s new tranquilizer\u201d, and the viral photo of a white Missouri couple pointing an AR-15 at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is the quality of the footage and the openness of the hostility.<\/p>\n

That couple, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, went on to speak at the 2020 Republican national convention and folded easily in Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America great again\u201d (Maga) movement, which harnessed and turbocharged the \u201cwhite fear industrial complex\u201d, as CNN host Brian Stelter put it in the film. Over 90 minutes, White with Fear traces the development and success of said complex post 1968, when Nixon rode the so-called \u201csouthern strategy\u201d \u2013 subtly endorsing racial segregation, discrimination and resentment to court erstwhile white voters in the South \u2013 to the White House. Nixon\u2019s approach demonstrated that \u201cwhen you appeal to whites on the basis of race, they will go all the way to changing their political party,\u201d said Andrew Goldberg, the film\u2019s director. \u201cNixon takes this slightly used strategy and puts it on steroids and makes it national policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it stayed national policy, at least as a conditional strategy of the right and propellant of the ongoing culture wars. White with Fear outlines numerous waves of the white fear industrial complex, such as anti-bussing actions in the 1970s, the popularity and endurance of Fox News, the post-September 11 anti-Muslim agenda, the Obama birtherism conspiracies first propagated by the US president, all the way through to the current Maga movement built on 55 years of Republican dog-whistling.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in the 60s and 70s, they\u2019d say: \u2018I\u2019m not talking about Blacks, I\u2019m talking about bussing,\u2019\u201d said Goldberg. \u201cNow you would say: \u2018I\u2019m not talking about Chinese people, I\u2019m talking about Covid.\u2019\u201d (Trump, of course, called the virus \u201ckung flu\u201d as president.) \u201cOr: \u2018I\u2019m not talking about Muslims, I\u2019m talking about terrorism.\u2019 But after we\u2019ve used those phrases so much, who comes to mind?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are words that are silent about race. And yet, when you say the word \u2018thug\u2019, who do you think about?\u201d he added. For most white Americans, there\u2019s an association with the color of one\u2019s skin. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the nature of how these words are dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film differentiates between the emotions provoked in white constituents, and the cynical political thinking that sees such emotions as a way to win elections. \u201cFrom a strategic point of view, there\u2019s a certain intelligence to how they approach this, and it\u2019s very successful,\u201d said Goldberg. Steve Bannon<\/a>, a chief architect of Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant campaign strategy, appears in the film to confirm an approach based around the idea of appealing to white voters scared of outsiders and alienated by the Democratic party. \u201cThey\u2019re so willing to talk about it,\u201d said a bemused Goldberg. \u201cThey don\u2019t blur the actions, as if they\u2019re trying to make it sound less or more virtuous or not. Bannon just loves to tell you what he does.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg spoke to several former or current Republican operatives who attest to numerous examples of politicians knowingly stoking racial resentment, including former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh<\/a>; Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers who defected and warned<\/a> against the rising risks of rightwing militant groups; and former Fox News host Carl Cameron. \u201cWe really tried to avoid having a collection of Democratic pundits pointing their finger and making accusations of Republicans,\u201d said Goldberg. \u201cIt was so important to us to have as many first-person sources who told us what they did. Or if there was an opinion to be cast on a situation, we wanted to get a Republican, or at least a former Republican, to tell us that story.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stories are indicative of a line of political thinking that has only grown more dominant and cynical. Tim Miller, a former Republican National Committee spokesperson who was one of the early GOP critics of Trump in 2016, remembers how Republican campaign mailers in 2008 referred to the Democratic candidate as \u201cBarack Hussein Obama\u201d because \u201cHussein\u201d drove engagement among older white voters. McHugh recalls working directly with Stephen Miller, Trump\u2019s deputy chief of policy and arguably the most racist and extremist<\/a> of his advisers, while a writer at Breitbart. A political consultant expresses no moral qualm with dog-whistling, as the job of a political consultant is to attract as many votes as possible, motivation irrelevant. At one point, Goldberg asks Sam Nunberg, a 2016 Trump campaign staffer, why Trump doesn\u2019t do normal Republican talking points like small government and lower taxes. He responds: \u201cBecause that shit is boring and we\u2019re not going to win! Straight up policy? That\u2019s Mitt Romney, and we\u2019re not winning.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is winning, at least at the moment, is outright racial baiting \u2013 decrying \u201cmigrant crime\u201d that doesn\u2019t exist, claiming that immigrants who are in fact reviving US cities<\/a> are instead \u201cdestroying\u201d them, fanning flames that critical race theory is hurting children, in the latest mutation of fear-based rhetoric that has converted more suburban mothers into rightwing political activists<\/a> via Moms for Liberty<\/a>. Even Hillary Clinton, who appears briefly to comment on the rise of Trumpism, concedes that \u201cit\u2019s brilliant\u201d to stoke fears that books with diverse characters could threaten the safety of white children.<\/p>\n

Some do believe it; many others know better. \u201cThe amount of planning and strategy that goes into all these actions are designed to keep the base engaged,\u201d Goldberg noted. \u201cWhen you win elections, you hold power. This is all a cynical ploy to hold power.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the year 1968, a group of housewives in Dearborn, Michigan, then a nearly all-white suburb of Detroit,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-142464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114593366372745688","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}