Turns out that instead of those endless rural diner profiles, political journalists should have been doing MAGA pieces in board rooms, on military bases, in private jets. https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1348611661360463872

Again, history is instructive to show how the white elite has used working-class white people as cover while they pulled the strings. Look at the White Citizen Council. By couching their racism in polite language, professionalism and status, media gave them a pass.

All the while, they were supporting and financing both the violent and legal suppression of democracy, filing lawsuits to overturn Brown v Board of Education and subverting federal court orders to maintain the racial hierarchy.

Elite white conservatives, with their degrees and status and polished veneer, have always been more dangerous than poor white people because they had power and received so much deference from the media.

This is the problem with the unsophisticated way we have come to understand racism. We think it is simply a sign of being uneducated, and so too many journalists needed to believe Trump supporters were either desperate or didn’t know better. Racism has always been about power.

Racism was created to justify economic and political exploitation, not the other way around.

No one can say that every Trump supporter is racist. But what we can say is that they understand the power of racism as a political organizing strategy and a means of unifying white Americans across social classes.

And before I get a 1000 “if you support a racist you’re racist tweets,” the point is, hearts and minds are irrelevant and we spend way too much time trying to discern if someone is racist. What do their actions tell us? How they *feel* is irrelevant.