WOT incoming:

In preparation for today's demonstrations by armed paramilitaries, street gangs & doomsday cults, I want to point anyone who follows extremism toward a powerful and underappreciated analysis of groups like the Proud Boys, III%ers, Patriot Prayer, etc.

Phil Neel's "Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict" is one of the most insightful works I've read dealing with groups like these. But it's outside the orbit of PVE/CVE/extremism studies, so few seem to have heard about it. (I'm a johnny-come-lately myself)

His analysis is particularly good in explaining the sometimes multiracial character of these groups. This has been a real source of conflict and muddiness in extremism studies. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/wageless-life/

It's easy to say that nonwhites in these groups are tokens, or self-hating, or useful idiots. And it's accurate to say that these groups are implicitly white supremacist, since their idealized mythic past and imagined communities are exclusionary and white-centered.

Often this imagined past/future expands whiteness to include (some) hispanics, or it "culturalizes" whiteness so that it isn't a matter of phenotype or w/e but of male supremacy, anti-Islam, anti-left politics, etc..

And of course, if you spend time on these groups' back channels, you'll see more than enough white supremacist and antisemitic chatter to prove that some members are indeed conscious, committed white supremacists in the most basic sense of the term.

But that still doesn't fully account for the presence of non-white members, and the complex (if reactionary) attitudes toward race that many white members hold. Another axis of interpretation is necessary.

Neel offers a serious material analysis of this issue, showing how economic precarity, bad land management, the environmental crisis, and more have created conditions which are amenable to far right politics and compatible with older forms of the white supremacist movement.

An excerpt:

There is so much room in extremism studies for serious class analysis. These issues tend to be reduced to arguments about a cartoon "white working class" or false dichotomies between race-based and class-based analysis, which are distorted from the jump.

I think today's demonstrations show that a new, complex form of racialization is being layered over more familiar species of white supremacy. We can't wait 5 years to play catch-up like what happened with the alt-right.

Listen to Phil Neel on @jouissancevamps podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-16-hinterland-part-1/id1496860192?i=1000503763215