At some point we're going to have to have a conversation about the historical and contemporary mainstreaming of violent extremism in the U.S. The January 6th "extremists" have the support of nearly 50% of Republican voters, >100 Republican representatives and several senators.

The entire Republican Party instigated and enabled a coup attempt and continues to mostly embrace a racist, fascist president. And that's just the partisan extremism that's been mainstreamed. Of course, there's the everyday, centuries-long extremism of settler and state violence.

It's hard to talk about extremism in this country because it's so deeply embedded and literally whitewashed with euphemisms by white people who are either afraid to call out white supremacist violence or are soothed by white supremacist violence because they're extremists, too.

We're a country founded by and for white supremacist extremists. That's why white supremacist extremists were allowed to overtake the Capitol yesterday. It's why millions of whites support them and it's why even whites who claim to be outraged by extremists call them "protestors"

The ongoing mainstreaming of white extremism is also why some radicalized people of color support these movements. As @vtreitler's work explains, assimilation into the U.S. racial hierarchy has historically involved coercing/inviting "non-whites" to uphold the racist paradigm.

We're dealing with centuries of mainstream extremism that most whites don't even have the language or moral imagination to describe. So they grasp for pathetic euphemisms like "mobs", "protestors" or "people with ties to far right groups".

The truth is harder to sit with so they don't even bother. The "extremism" is home-grown, supported by members of their own community and possibly even embraced by that part of their psyche that's been socialized to accept, minimize or actively support white supremacist violence.

People of color are not exempt from these dynamics, either. I'm thinking about how many "non-whites" in the U.S. were co-opted by the racist theatre of terror surrounding 9/11 into supporting state and everyday violence against people racialized and perceived as "Muslim"..

I'm thinking about how we are all collectively socialized by the twisted forces of white supremacy to respond and react when the "enemy combatant" is racialized as Brown, Black, Muslin and/or foreign rather than white, male, Christian and domestic..

I'm sorry to say that if "Muslim terrorists" had overtaken the Capitol yesterday, most people, including avowed progressives and "antiracists" and certainly journalists would have viscerally *felt* that fear differently than whatever we experienced watching white extremists.

I think most people who are anti-coup felt some combination of outrage, disgust, anxiety, fear and embarrassment yesterday. But those emotional reactions were significantly different from what they would have been if the extremists were not white men..

We've all been socialized to "live with" the historical and present-day realities of white entitlement to political violence. And "living with" the terror of white supremacy entails, to some degree, a muted and distorted emotional response. Even on the part of people of color..