Okay.

It's time to talk about how the American Right stoked white supremacist paranoia while our media failed to tell the story that white terrorism is by far the biggest threat to our safety.

Here's what I learned researching my book AMERICAN RULE.

1/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/american-rule-by-jared-yates-sexton/

By now we're very familiar with Donald Trump and Fox News and every endangered Republican blaming "Antifa," a made-up "terrorist" organization, while FNC peddles altered footage.

It is a distraction they have used for decades now and hides actual threats.

2/

Fox News, since its founding, has peddled the idea that leftists and people of color are dangerous and fundamentally enemies of America.

Their narrative of the protests and movements has only thrown gas onto this fire.

3/

For those who've followed my writing, you know by now that Roger Ailes designed Fox News specifically to manufacture a right wing propaganda arm and to construct an alternate reality to help Republicans win elections.

It has been one of the most destructive inventions ever.

4/

What Fox News sells its viewers is an alternate reality where white power is constantly on the verge of collapse and under attack by a combination of people of color, liberated women, LGBTQ Americans, and outside "puppetmasters," including the usual anti-Semitic targets.

5/

What FNC and the GOP sells the American Right is a thinly-veiled New World Order conspiracy theory that there is a dangerous plot to destroy America and end white supremacist, patriarchal, evangelical power.

This is the product, the purpose, and the message.

6/

But here's the truth: while the Right sells these conspiracy theories, the danger from this "plot" is nonexistent.

It hides that Right Wing white supremacist terrorists are actually the greatest threat to America by far.

7/

While Fox and the Right have focused on the occasional broken window or burnt building, they have distracted from the fact that white supremacist terrorists have been actively working to spread murder and mayhem in order to realize a race war or fascist dictatorship.

8/

The vision of America the Right is peddling shows people of color as "potential" threats and their protests as disasters waiting to happen.

Meanwhile, white supremacists and paranoid white people are carrying guns, intimidating, threatening to murder people.

9/

These narratives have taken eyes away from these incidents, including one in which a KKK leader plowed his truck into peaceful protestors.

Again. "Potential" danger vs. Actual danger.

10/

What we're watching right now is a raising of tension. Paranoid white Americans are reacting to peaceful protests by arming themselves, forming vigilante mobs, and the incidents are growing in number and in potential for loss of life and real bloodshed.

11/

But of course, that's not all.

There have been attempts in the very recent past to kill and sow destruction, including plans to destroy hospitals, to spread the pandemic, to loosen the threads of society.

These are all things the Right claims protesters MIGHT do.

12/

Meanwhile, armed white militias have gone so far as to actually shut down legislatures and intimidate politicians.

We've noted the discrepancy in how these incidents are handled, but it only speaks to a much, much larger problem in America.

13/

Right Wing, paranoid terrorism has been a constant threat for so long now, but we have treated it, because of white supremacy, as a collection of "lone nuts" instead of the epidemic it is.

They've sent bombs. Attempted widespread assassinations, the overthrow of government.

14/

We've seen so many people murdered by white terrorists, incidents that have gripped the nation.

But we've yet to come to terms with it or really have a large-scale conversation.

Why?

Because of white supremacy, both recognized and unconscious.

15/

We need to go back.

Let's start in 2001, when George W. Bush's administration mishandled our security and failed to protect our nation.

All the signs were there. It was obvious what was building. And they failed to act.

16/

The sad, hidden truth that American history has now hidden is that September 11th was incredibly preventable and the fact that it wasn't stopped is a national shame.

Instead, we plunged headfirst into a white supremacist paranoid frenzy.

17/

From a highly preventable act by a small group of terrorists, we created a massive culture of fear in order to hide that failure.

We were manipulated into believing that terrorism from abroad was a bigger threat than our fellow Americans.

It was never true.

18/

We were plunged into an illegal war with Iraq because the men surrounding and puppeting W. Bush had been salivating over the war way, way, WAY before 9/11.

We were fed a lie that fed into a bigger lie of white supremacist paranoia.

That the world was out to get us.

19/

But we have to go back, once more, to the Confederacy.

The ultimate act of domestic white terrorism.

The South betrayed America, fought for the enslavement of human beings, and led to over half a million murdered people.

All because of white supremacist paranoia.

20/

Of course, no conversation would be complete without a mention of the Ku Klux Klan, one of America's most dangerous and lasting domestic terrorist groups.

They've created terror for centuries now, all of it powered by white supremacist paranoia and conspiracy theories.

21/

We don't like to discuss this, because it doesn't fit America's narrative, but the KKK wasn't just a post-Civil War southern phenomenon.

It grew to encapsulate the country, controlled states like Indiana in totality and operated out in the opening as a political force.

22/

Build off the KKK, pre-World War II America saw the rise of the German American Bund, literal American Nazis who pledged themselves to Adolf Hitler and white supremacy.

It was a massive, massive movement and another act of paranoid white supremacy.

23/

Though the Bund was German in its sympathies, they managed to tie Nazism to George Washington, the Confederacy, and America's foundation, because all of it was easily intertwined.

This is from a rally in Madison Square Garden that drew thousands upon thousands.

24/

But fascism and white terrorism didn't disappear after the fall of the Third Reich.

It grew in America as an ever-expanding network, pushed by men like William Pierce, who advocated a future fascist revolution that would create a white supremacist ethnostate.

25/

While the Right wants to blame "Antifa," which isn't even an organization, domestic white terrorists are extremely organized and gather around a set of ideologies and goals, including one put forth by Pierce in The Turner Diaries to realize a white fascist state.

26/

Again. Our media treated Timothy McVeigh like a lone nut, but he was a soldier in the planned white terrorist revolution.

The bombing of the OKC Federal Building was an attempt to set off a new civil war where white supremacists could gain power over the country.

27/

If you can see it already, let's state it clearly: yes, the people in America right now, attempting to use protests and unrest to start a civil war?

They're part of the same organized effort and pursuit as Timothy McVeigh.

This is the story no one tells.

28/

It's a really complicated and unnerving story when it's put together and explained.

These mass murderers, white domestic terrorists, mass shooters, they're part of a larger existential threat.

Admitting they're real means wrestling with America's white supremacy problem.

29/

It's so much easier to tell a story about young men who are unwell or unhinged instead of piecing together America's history of white domestic terrorism as a story of how white paranoia stands as an everpresent threat.

It means seeing that WE ARE THE ENEMY.

30/

How our media and cultural conversation fails is by showing these things, these movements, these dangers, as if they're aberrations instead of part of our larger cultural disease.

Our inherent white supremacy makes it almost impossible to tell the actual story.

31/

But it's more than just being delusional. It puts us at risk.

While our media peddles paranoia over people of color, white domestic terrorists are organizing, training, gaining power and resources, and moving ever closer to their goal of violent, fascist revolution.

32/

White domestic terrorists are being arrested and exposed constantly. The reports are all there, just out of sight.

They're actually plotting the type of violence that media lays at the feet of people of color and protests as "potential" violence.

33/

Meanwhile, literal Neo-Nazis are radicalizing young white men to join terrorist cells in the exact same way al-Qaeda and ISIS have.

What we've done is focus on a problem abroad and completely ignored a growing problem within.

Because of white supremacy.

34/

But it's not just explicitly avowed white supremacists. White supremacist paranoia has infected groups of conspiracy theorists like Qanon with radicalization meant to create fascism.

It isn't innocuous. These people have already killed and are angling for more.

35/

Of course, it doesn't help that Donald Trump signals to white Americans that they'll need to prepare themselves for a New World Order-style takeover.

He has normalized white supremacist paranoia on a scale many of us thought impossible.

36/

Like Fox News, Donald Trump has normalized fascistic white supremacist paranoia and the accompanying flood of conspiracy theories, communicated it to white Americans terrified by this propaganda, and radicalized thousands if not millions.

37/

The point is this: white paranoia and insecurity over these protests is projection. Americans are watching an actual, lawful, peaceful protests and seeing their own dangerous imprinted on people of color.

Which is exactly what the Right has been doing for centuries.

38/

There is a story that isn't being told here, and that is that white supremacist paranoia and insecurity is BY FAR the biggest threat to the United States of America.

It's racking up victims left and right, it has enabled the worst parts of the American character.

39/

The danger isn't the New World Order.

It isn't people of color fighting for their rights and live.

The danger is white supremacy. It always has been, and it always will be, because white supremacy necessitates fascism and acts of terrorism when power is threatened.

40/

The story of America has been about power and control. When that power and that control is threatened you can pinpoint that's exactly when white domestic terrorism rears its ugly head.

It's a matter of desiring the veneer of democracy but settling for violence.

41/

We're in a moment of vast and dangerous white insecurity. The power structure is endangered, and so white domestic terrorism is coming to the forefront.

Recognize it, fight against it. History as we know it has been shaped to hide it and embolden it. See the real threat.

42/42