Radical Jihad and Paranoid Supremacists

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew W. Hughey, ‘The Janus Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism’, Sociology Compass 3/6 (2009): 920–936, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2009.00244.x Author’s introduction Over the past 20 years, the study of white racial identity has received in‐depth, interdisciplinary attention. Under sociological scrutiny, the study of whiteness has traversed quite a few stages: from understandings of whiteness as a category replete with social privileges, as a mere reflection of non‐racial (often class‐based) dynamics, to its most recent turn that emphasizes the contextual and intersectional heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of the increased attention to context and political disputes, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum – from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist – is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white racial identity. Motivated by this academic milieu, this guide offers an overview of the major scholarship that address white nationalism & white antiracism, appropriate online materials, and examples from a sample syllabus. Together, these resources aim to assist in understanding the general processes and contexts that produce ‘whiteness’ and imbue it with meaning, the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity identities become embedded, and how whiteness simultaneously possesses material and symbolic privileges alongside diverse and seemingly antagonistic experiences. Author recommends The complexity of whiteness McDermott, Monica and Frank L. Samson 2005. ‘White Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States.’ Annual Review of Sociology 31 : 245–61. Any contemporary apprentice of the sociological study of white racial identity should read this essay. Monica McDermott and her student Frank Samson combine to provide a robust overview of the literature. They walk the tightrope of balancing both a broad coverage of the literature with the depth that key studies necessitate. In so doing, they put a finger on the key dilemma of studying white racial identity today: ‘Navigating between the long‐term staying power of white privilege and the multifarious manifestations of the experience of whiteness remains the task of the next era of research on white racial and ethnic identity’ (2005: 256). Duster, Troy 2001. ‘The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness.’ Pp. 113–33 in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness , edited by E. B. Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica and M. Wray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In this essay – part of a larger volume on whiteness that I also recommend – Duster synthesizes disparate approaches to the study of whiteness. Demonstrating how some scholars understand white racial identity as a contextual and cognitive category (‘fluid’), while some frame whiteness as a structural and fixed category of material privileges (‘frozen’), Duster asks ‘who is right?’ He answers via the metaphor of whiteness‐as‐water. In one moment, whiteness can morph into vapor as a contextual and unstable identity, while the next moment it can instantly transform into a harsh and unyielding form of ice‐like privilege. Duster’s essay is an excellent retort for those who argue that we should move ‘beyond’ race to the utopian realm of color‐blind individualism. Duster demonstrates, although the example of the supposedly egalitarian New Deal, that while race is socially constructed, the legacy of racism remains a historically reproduced and real social fact – denying the existence of race perpetuates racial inequality. Duster closes the chapter with a personal anecdote that grounds the historical example in modern, interactional, and everyday life. Perry, Pamela 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perry gives us two ethnographic studies in one – that of two northern California high schools: one located in a predominantly white, if economically diverse, suburb, the other situated in a multiracial urban community. Perry persistently and systematically probes the complexities of white racial identity in the practices and discourses of the youth attending these high schools. She finds that whites in the predominantly white, suburban high school do not see themselves as a unique race and take their racial identity for granted – they understand distinctly white practices as normative rather than as constitutive of a subjective worldview. In contrast, the whites at the multiracial, urban high school possess a more critical and comparative view of race and their own place in the racial order. In sum, Perry argues that whiteness is a set of complex, contradictory, and multiple subject positions. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matt Wray brings the tools of cultural sociology viz‐á‐viz ‘symbolic boundaries’ to the interrogation of the moniker White Trash . Wray problematizes this relatively normalized term to question its origins and how it persists. Drawing upon literary texts, folklore, diaries, medical articles, and social scientific analyses from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, Wray documents the multiple meanings that were projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Of particular import, Wray demonstrates how white supremacist ideas about class and region became dominant through public health campaigns and eugenic reformations. Impoverished whites found themselves the targets of officials and activists who framed them as ‘filthy’ or “feebleminded,” and thus a threat to the purity and supremacy of the white race. This text is particularly informative for its demonstration of how white supremacist logic was not only focused on racial ‘otherness’ but used the axes of class and location to directly demarcate and attack those seen as ‘white’ yet somehow racially deficient and unworthy. Winant, Howard 2004. ‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics.’ Pp. 3–16 in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society , edited by Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and April Burns. New York, NY: Routledge. In applying his now classic approach formulated in concert with Michael Omi ( Racial Formations , 1986), Howard Winant applies the ‘racial projects’ thesis to whites: ‘I think it would be beneficial to attempt to sort out alternative conceptions of whiteness, along with the politics that both flow from and inform these conceptions. … focusing on five key racial projects, which I term, far right, new right, neoconservative, neoliberal, and new abolitionist ’ (2004: 6). Hence, Winant maps a theory of white identity formation onto a bifurcated ‘culture war.’ Labeling this phenomenon ‘racial dualism as politics,’ Winant advances a paradigm in which whiteness is undergoing ‘a profound political crisis.’ Winant’s essay is especially important for those that wish to emphasize the heterogeneity of white racial identity, as he provides Weberian‐like ‘ideal types’ for the comprehension of the racial‐political landscape. Hughey, Matthew W. (forthcoming 2010). ‘Navigating the (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of “Hegemonic Whiteness.”’ Ethnic & Racial Studies. In this work, I build upon many of the aforementioned studies. Like Pamela Perry (2002) I dive into two ethnographic sites, but of much different breed. To interrogate how whiteness might be akin to ‘vapor and ice’ (Duster 2001) and to provide a robust answer to the dilemma of the ‘long‐term staying power of

In this paper, we argue that white supremacist values have been mainstreamed in the United States, and that the values driving the male supremacist and white supremacist movements are significant in fueling mass sympathy for January 6th (J6). To examine the white and male supremacy questions in relation to J6, we draw on a national survey from IPSOS. We also commissioned a poll with Harris Insights. The IPSOS poll was conducted from July 30 to August 16, 2021, and includes a nationally representative sample of 5,299 Americans. The Harris poll was conducted from October 20–25, 2022, and contacted a nationally representative sample of 2,029 Americans. We argue that J6 should be understood at the nexus point between white supremacist, populist, and fascist politics, not only in terms of the values driving the insurrectionists, but those in the mass public who are sympathetic to them. Right-wing populism, we believe, privileges white supremacy and white nationalism, male supremacy and political leadership that relies on an appeal to the cult of patriarchal personality, trust in the wisdom of “the people,” and distrust of political leaders – particularly Democratic leaders – who are framed as “corrupt,” “out of touch” “elites” working against the public good and democracy.

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

Does "White" Equal "White Supremacy"? Marcia Noe (bio) What do we think of when we hear the term "White supremacy"? A Grand Dragon in a hood and sheet? A Tiki Torch-bearing neo-Nazi? Britt Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno would like to change that perception. In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy in the American Midwest, they offer us a new way to conceptualize White supremacy: they argue that it is less an individual mindset or pattern of behavior than it is a part of the systems and structures of power that control resources and lives. Halvorson and Reno's case rests on their analysis of midwestern works of the imagination, as well as accounts from popular media, and the ways in which these works enact a pastoral mythology that constructs the Midwest as White. Further, they maintain that the whiteness of these works enables White supremacy, which, in turn, furthers nationalist and imperialist projects. Undeniably, White supremacy is an egregiously serious problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 733 hate groups in the United States, 47 of which are categorized as White nationalist organizations.1 Many of these are located in the Midwest, and Halvorson and Reno are right to inquire about the region's participation in this heinous social movement and to analyze the ways in which midwestern discourse informs identity and shapes thinking about race. As Jon K. Lauck observes, "regional identities arise from the aspirations, visions, and self-perceptions of those who create and monopolize the discourses about the localities and regions in which they occur."2 Lauck is talking about the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves as Midwesterners. These stories, derived from agrarian principles, portray Midlanders as virtuous, industrious, and self-reliant. Are these White stories? And, if they are, does that whiteness equate to White supremacy? And does this implicate the region in national and global racist endeavors? Halvorson and Reno would answer yes to these questions. [End Page 141] Energized by the attention directed at White working-class heartland voters in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Halvorson and Reno address what they believe is a culturally misplaced emphasis. Trumpism is not a new thing, they point out, showing how, throughout the region's history, midwestern pastoralism has been portrayed on stage and screen, in the visual arts and in popular discourse, as normative virtuousness through which good, elite Whites distance themselves from deplorable, racist Others. They contend that this conceptualization does not address the region's structural racism and its depredations. "We need fresh, new ways of thinking about and seeing what racism is and does in order to begin the multigenerational, hard, and unglamorous work of dismantling white supremacy," they assert (4). Perhaps a useful way to understand this argument is to reflect on second-wave feminism's conceptualization of "woman" compared to that of third-wave feminism. Fifty years ago, second-wave feminists talked about "women" and "women's rights" in an essentialized way that tacitly equated "women" with White, middle-class, cis-gendered heterosexual women, thus eliding women of color, queer women, and working-class women. More recently, third-wave feminists have offered the corrective of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. This new way of thinking jettisons a generic woman to make way for an inclusive feminism that acknowledges that oppression is experienced differently by women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.3 Similarly, Halvorson and Reno are arguing that the Midwest has been constructed in just such an essentialized manner that elides ethnic and racial differences. However, the authors stumble when they take their claims one step further. Their argument is grounded in Frances Lee Ansley's definition of White supremacy: "a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily resonated across a broad array of institutions and social settings" (53). This definition is capacious enough to include almost everything White or "coded White" and thus fails to provide an adequate warrant for Halvorson and Reno's claims that "the whiteness of the Midwest...

Reviewed by: Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster Sarah Robertson Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States. By Travis M. Foster. (Oxford Studies in American Literary History) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. vii+168 pp. £53. ISBN 978–0–19–883809–8. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States is a timely intervention into debates about the insidious levels of racism that have been the cornerstone of American society since slavery. Foster primarily examines the rise of white supremacy in the years after the American Civil War, yet usefully frames his discussion in the light of ongoing, systemic racism and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Looking at the role narrative plays in proliferating white supremacy, Foster calls for greater critical recognition of how popular genres propagate political ideology and engender broad consensus. While Foster's central focus is on white supremacy, he also explores gospel sermons and the development of a post-emancipation African American collective identity. His examination of gospel sermons mirrors his approach across the book as he concentrates exclusively on popular genres. Foster's multigenre study explores the white popular genres of campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Civil War elegies, before considering gospel sermons in the closing chapter. He convincingly argues for the relevance of these less-studied, everyday genres to any understanding of how white nationalism emerged out of sectionalism's hostile divisions and of how African Americans were united by gospel sermons that preached an alternative communal vision. Indeed, Foster suggests that the everyday nature of these genres, which reached individuals, families, and communities across the nation, was a critical element in crystallizing notions of collective identity. For Foster, the popular appeal of campus novels between the 1860s and the turn of the twentieth century was concomitant with significant changes occurring in higher education as US universities and colleges sought 'to assert themselves as epicentres of American futurity' and 'models for new configurations of democratic community and networks for installing a more robust national identity' (p. 29). Foster convincingly argues that these campus novels, which championed notions of fraternity and nostalgia, reflected the white-centric model of national identity that was being reforged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In a similar vein, he goes on to explore how readers of the Ladies' Home Journal repeatedly encountered anti-black messages while being indoctrinated into a 'politics of friendship in which intimacy between white women naturalized whiteness as the foremost precondition for American citizenship' (p. 44). In his work on Civil War elegies, Foster calls for a more critically nuanced reading of the genre as he explores three distinct 'attitudes for mourning and remembering [End Page 489] the dead: nationalist, antiwar, and melancholic' (p. 63). His approach to elegies challenges what Foster perceives as a tendency among critics to focus on 'literary exceptionalism' rather than on forms and genres whose 'ordinariness [. . .] might help us to apprehend the ordinary as something other than flat' (p. 67). Indeed, the crux of Foster's argument about white supremacy rests on the pernicious quality of genres whose 'everydayness' belies the political messages at their core, while he also examines how the reach and ordinariness of gospel sermons helped to undermine 'the logic of white supremacy and white nationalism through experimentation with forms of being and being together' (p. 87). Across the study, Foster significantly moves beyond southern racism in the Jim Crow South as he underlines the nationwide appeal of these genres. This line of enquiry comes to the fore particularly in Chapter 3 in Foster's discussion of Civil War elegies, and the way these poetic forms circumvented sectionalism in their mourning lament for lost, white lives, both North and South. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States contains a timely emphasis on Northern as well as Southern racism and how the two regions were actively encouraged to put aside hostilities and antipathy after the Civil War to reunite around a white nationalist ideal. However, a more sustained examination of how those genres reached both Northern and Southern audiences would have fully underscored Foster's...

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

Fig. 1: Bated Breath (mirror detail), 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. The term monster has its etymological roots in Latin, deriving from monere, meaning to warn, and demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal (Musharbash; Cohen “Hybrids”). Monsters are therefore beings that exhibit behaviours that threaten the familiar, warning others of the dangers of transgressing cultural norms. Online media provides a platform on which many transgressions take place, resulting in acts that could be described as monstrosities. As monsters are imbued with cultural meaning, they serve as conceptual frameworks through which to analyse social systems and structures. In this article we draw on literature from monster studies and monster anthropology, as well as representations of monsters in popular media, as a means through which to discuss online racism. Our article is inspired by the themes explored in Bated Breath (see figs. 1, 2, 3), an artwork by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope (Australia), whose installation embodies the function of a monster. Cope’s art both reveals the prevalence of online racism, which is often directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whilst also warning of our susceptibility of contributing or remaining complacent to such harmful behaviour. We begin by discussing what monsters are, how they are portrayed in popular media, and consider the liminal worlds in which they live. The next section highlights the prevalence of online racism, which we assess through the concepts of “clickbait” and “trolling”, reflecting on how this reinforces power imbalances by spreading misinformation, conjecture, and racial abuse. In the final section we look at monsters as mirrors, unpacking the need to reflexively engage with the ramifications of online behaviour. If Indigenous voices and self-determination are overlooked, and the nation refuses to enter a mature dialogue pertaining to its colonial past and present, monstrosities such as those which regularly occur online are doomed to continue to haunt us all in various forms. The Metaphysical Presence of Monsters Social media have an auspicious hold over many people’s lives, becoming not only a medium through which to share and encounter views, opinions, and experiences, but also an agent that shapes and facilitates how people interact with and respond to their surroundings (Petray “Self-writing”). In the digital age known as Web 2.0 (Petray “Protest 2.0”; Corbett et al.), social media both influence and determine behaviour as much as they reflect it. The online world is a cannibalistic monstrous interface where multiple ideas, behaviours and discussions feed off and into one another, creating swirls of activity that can quickly sweep people up and turn them into the objects of collective discourses. It is this cyclonic-like force that is the subject of Bated Breath. Fig. 2: Bated Breath, 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. In the artwork, Cope features 1300 ceramic fish that hang from the ceiling, spiralling downward towards a mirrored disc that lies on the floor of the gallery in which it stands. Each fish is painted with a coating that reflects light and its surroundings. Although the work does not directly reference monsters, Cope has nonetheless given body and a physical presence to the overwhelming grasp that social media have over many people’s lives. Her use of light and mirrors project refracted light and shadows throughout the gallery, reminding viewers that by simply being in the presence of Bated Breath they too are susceptible to being sucked into its monster-like vortex. In the label accompanying the work, Cope states: Often baited with racism, social media spaces have become a trap and a divisive tool that sanctions a common form of lateral violence within Aboriginal communities. The mirror symbolically refers to narcissism, involving self-centred, arrogant thinking and behaviour lacking empathy. Caught in such a vortex encourages mob mentality and prohibits autonomy. Like a monster, Cope’s installation has a metaphysical presence that “shows”, “warns”, and speaks to the dangers of social media, particularly for Aboriginal peoples within settler-colonial settings (Carlson and Frazer). Online spaces can be unsafe for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Carlson and Kennedy). It is an environment where colonial sentiments—which emphasise white supremacy whilst simultaneously questioning and denying Indigeneity—are pervasive and widespread (Carlson and Kennedy). A study conducted by Tristan Kennedy found that 62% of the Aboriginal people they surveyed have daily experiences of racism online. While such racism can be overt, aggressive, and threatening, it often takes the more subtle, but equally demoralising, form of paternalistic white benevolence that as Cope highlights “prohibits autonomy”. Monsters have been described as the “fragmentation and recombination” (Cohen “Monster Theory” 11) of parts that formulate a grotesque assembly, much like Frankenstein’s Creature. The fragmentations of social media addressed by Cope are racist online journalism, fake news, and clickbait. These fragments are discussed in the latter half of this article. Before we unpack these further, however, it is first necessary to discuss social media as an environment parallel to the settings in which monsters are often situated, a space we are calling ‘monstrous worlds’. Fig. 3: Bated Breath (fish detail), 2021. Chrome-plated ceramic fish on steel frame with fishing line and mirror. Reproduced courtesy of M. Cope and UQ Art Museum. Photo: Carl Warner. The Internet as a Monstrous World Within the monstrous worlds depicted in popular media, narratives overwhelmingly focus on human struggles, conflictions, and emotions such as fear, greed, desire, revenge, pride, or love (Asma). They explore human conditions, power-dynamics, and conceptions of morality. Jeffrey Cohen observes, however, that despite the repulsive appearance and actions of monsters, it is ultimately humans who come off worse. Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) and David Lynch’s portrayal of Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980) are both stories that subvert monstrosity by asking who the real ‘freaks’, ‘animals’, or ‘monsters’ are: the subjects of an objectified gaze, or those who humiliatingly gaze upon a so-called ‘other’? Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour are often seen and treated as monsters, as Cohen (“Monster Theory” 12) observes: given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly transformed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of masculinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought. Although Cohen’s use of the term “nonwhites” is problematic in that it homogenises diverse groups of Black, Indigenous and Persons of Colour, whiteness is best conceived as a structural orientation of power. It normalises white authority and superiority, classifying others (regardless of their ethnic or cultural diversity) in relation to that group’s ability or willingness to conform to white colonial power structures (Moreton-Robinson; Bargallie). Monstrous worlds, however, are spaces where social structures, apparatuses of control, discipline, and governance are challenged, subverted, reinvented, or sought to be reinstated. The monstrous world of a zombie apocalypse necessitates the transgression of everyday norms as a means of survival and re-creation. Such breaks are contextualised in relation to how things were before (or how they were imagined to be), or conversely, how we wish them to be in the future. During a zombie apocalypse in the television series The Walking Dead (2010-2021), for example, the African American protagonists provide a revisionist history of America’s colonial past by drafting a charter to which to govern future behaviour in the “New (Zombie) World”. This was a process that African Americans were left out of during the drafting of the America’s constitution. Whilst revisionist in this regard, the show nonetheless maintains a white colonial narrative, situating the threat “outside”, and beyond the safety of the walled colony (Turner and Perks). The outbreak of a virus serves as the origin story to many monster narratives, and similarly mirrors historic outbreaks in society. Zombie stories in the 1980s, for example, mirror anxieties relating to the transmission of HIV (Musharbash “Introduction”). While it is too soon to imagine the portrayal of monsters relating to COVID-19 (but history signifies that it will likely be a topic of future works, see Marsh et al.), the recent coronavirus pandemic has nonetheless provoked a reconsideration of what “normality” or a “new norm” is. More importantly, it has pointed to the new possibilities that lie on the otherside of a monstrous situation (Fredericks and Bradfield “We Don’t Want”). The world of monsters offers social freedoms that necessitate—even celebrate—acts that would otherwise be unimaginable or in some cases abhorrent. With this comes the possibility for change. A parallel between the world of monsters and online/social media can be drawn. Musharbash writes on how monsters embody a hybrid liminal existence situated betwixt categories such as animal/human or life/death. It is the morphing between such categories alongside its distortion—which simultaneously renders something familiar and alien—that creates a heightened sense of anxiety, risk, or danger. The world in which monsters exist is liminal for it is an environment that reflects familiar social structures and norms, while at the same time becoming “other”. Social media can be likene

The article examines the far-right idea of a Jewish-led ‘conspiracy of homosexualisation’ between the 1970s and the late 1990s. To this end, it primarily scrutinizes the monthly magazine Instauration, edited by Wilmot Robertson. Embedded in a broader narrative that claimed that a Jewish-led regime of ‘liberal-minority racism’ would discriminate against white people in general and White men in particular, white nationalists and white supremacists such as Robertson imagined sexual politics as an important field of anti-white oppression. In addition to feminism and ‘miscegenation’, the promotion of ‘homosexual rights’ and the spread of homosexuality were conceived of as another means of Jews to undermine the white patriarchal family, which white nationalists and supremacists idealized as the backbone of the nation's well-being. Conceiving of homosexuality as a threat to white people and ‘white reproduction’, white nationalists and white supremacists claimed that the alleged struggle for ‘homosexual rights’ constituted a strategy used by Jews to maintain their supposed social, cultural and economic power and dominance.

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

Women and couples who have had the misfortune of losing pregnancies, particularly multiple pregnancies, would often wish to know why the miscarriages happened. This information is important for them to make sense of the loss, help with closure, and seek treatments to avoid future miscarriages. Healthcare practitioners would want to know the reason for the miscarriages so that they can provide accurate prognostic information and offer targeted treatments to improve future pregnancy outcomes. The deeply felt need for finding reasons for miscarriages has led to the proliferation of multiple tests. But which one are useful? And which ones are fake? Which test results show an association with miscarriage, have prognostic value, and guide treatment? Which ones don’t? This lecture takes an evidence-based lens to these questions to tease apart the real news from fake news.

The divisiveness witnessed during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, a nationwide discord on a scale not witnessed since the tumultuous Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace campaign of 1968, has necessitated an examination of hate within the United States. Characterized by rhetoric of nationalism and isolationism reminiscent of ideologies espoused by white nationalists, Trump’s campaign energized the American racist right. Indeed, the most prominent US-based white supremacist websites, the neo-Nazi Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, launched extensive online campaigns supporting Trump’s presidential bid, and both sites experienced dramatic increases in traffic. This essay examines some of the divisive rhetoric Trump employed during his presidential campaign and the various ways in which that rhetoric appears to have resonated with US-based white supremacists. Examining white supremacists’ Internet rhetoric enables persons to be alerted to the possibility of white supremacist advocacy or activity and to better understand how white supremacists attempt to form, or become a part of, a community of like-minded persons. While several acts of murderous violence in the United States have been associated with white supremacist content appearing online, examinations of US-based white supremacists’ Internet rhetoric may assist individuals, including law enforcement and homeland security professionals, in guarding against similar violence in the future.

Reviewed by: Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster Brigitte Fielder FOSTER, TRAVIS M. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 176 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Travis Foster's Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States reads the "ordinariness" of literary genre against the ordinariness of anti-Black racism in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. In popular genres, Foster traces "the interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms," showing how generic reading experiences encouraged both shared racial identification and shared racist sentiment (2). If genres, as Foster holds, "produce and give substance to the ordinary," exhibiting habitual practices of writing and reading, they also evidence "habitual practices of racism" (15, 5). Utilizing familiarity and nostalgia, the ordinariness of genre also contained racism's ordinary forms. Overwhelmingly, Foster does not examine texts that focus on racial relations or racial violence. His first three chapters deal with texts whose casual—everyday—forms of racism might easily be overlooked by readers who have only learned to attend to more overt forms of racist violence, particularly alongside histories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. That such racism might fly under the radar illustrates how deeply embedded anti-Black racism is in US literary culture. These texts were not expressly concerned with race, even as they exhibit a shared investment in white supremacy; it is often their understated commitments to whiteness to which Foster attends. [End Page 310] Foster's first three chapters take up genres that effectively work to reinforce white identity among readers, even across various points of difference. Attending not only to generic similarities but differences, Foster highlights not genre's confinements but its elasticity. He here compares genre's ability to include variation with "the capacious elasticity of whiteness" (19). The genres of the book's early chapters foreground whiteness's absorptive ability, incorporating European immigrants, people of different classes, and those with different geographical origins and orientations and political positions. By foregrounding inclusion, racial exclusion is subtler, often implied rather than said outright, but foundational to the establishment of white national fantasies and white social practices. The first two chapters treat forms aimed at gendered readerships: the campus novel and the women's periodical The Ladies' Home Journal. Both, Foster argues, produced ideas of fraternity and sorority that were mutually constituted alongside post-war white nationalism. Of campus novels, Foster writes, "white sectional reconciliation remained the genre's foremost concern into the early twentieth century" (24). The camaraderie displayed here is dependent upon whiteness, even (or perhaps especially) as it reaches across divides of class, region, and gender. Campus novels here become "populist fables" in their pretense at universality while leaving racial exclusion implicit (33). Playing on nostalgia in these narratives of forging friendship across difference, this genre's overarching script lends itself to "sectional reconciliation and transsectional whiteness" (38). Although some of the campus novels Foster discusses take up women's college experiences, the second chapter more closely examines white sororal attachments and friendship. Like white campus life, "white women's culture and white women's friendships collaborated as constituents within the ordinariness of postbellum antiblackness" (44). This chapter takes as its primary example The Ladies' Home Journal, which evidenced similarly reconciliationist rhetoric in women's friendship formation. Reading and friendship are coupled in the periodical's framing, imagining potential readers as a sororal community of friends and "forging American womanhood into a distinctly white nationalist disposition" (51). Such a disposition arises from the journal's various expressions of anti-Blackness, in representations of Black characters, uses of nostalgia, and mundane uses of anti-Black humor, as well as the habitual exclusion of Black writers from its pages. The readerly friendships forged here were carefully and clearly segregated. The book's third chapter turns to the Civil War elegy as a form that brought together dissenting positions with relation to the war and even assessments of its value—united under a shared position of white mourning. Foster treats distinctions amid this broader genre in order to illustrate how differing approaches to mourning the (white) war dead were still incorporated into a...

Reviewed by: Circle Jerk by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley Trevor Boffone CIRCLE JERK. By Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley. Co-directed by Rory Pelsue and dramaturg Ariel Sibert. Produced by Jeremy O. Harris. Fake Friends, Theater Mitu, Brooklyn, New York. October 21, 2020. If pandemic theatre has had three stages, then Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s highly collaborative Circle Jerk firmly sits at the entry point to the third stage. It moves beyond streaming archived video of productions and Zoom theatre to give audiences something that feels squarely made just for a digital platform. Contrary to most digital theatre during the pandemic, Circle Jerk was a live theatrical event that happened in real time with the use of digital tools. To say that Circle Jerk wouldn’t work in a traditional theatre with a live audience would be an understatement. Circle Jerk firmly pushes forward the potential of digital theatre in a socially distanced age, offering a blueprint for how theatre can evolve and make the best use of digital technologies and platforms. Circle Jerk critiques white gay culture and meme culture. As such, it is largely written for a certain age demographic—millennials—and spectators who are immersed in certain avenues of popular culture: social media, musical theatre, and reality television. Circle Jerk examines online culture, liberal gays, and white supremacy on the fictional “Gayman Island,” which might as well be a stand-in for Fire Island. On Gayman Island, a Milo Yiannopoulus-esque far-right gay man, Jurgen Yionoullis (Foley), schemes to bring white liberal gay men to his alt-right “paradise.” Yionoullis has been cancelled across the web and decides to enact revenge with the help of his meme-creator friend Lord Baby Bussy (Breslin). There are nine characters, mostly played by Breslin and Foley, whose quick changes made it seem as though the performance must have been pre-recorded even though it was performed live. Their ability to morph seamlessly from character to character expanded the possibilities of digital theatre. Some of the casting even defied logic and facilitated the screwball comedy. For instance, Foley played boyfriends Jurgen and Patrick, who share scenes despite being played by the same actor. Breslin and Foley were joined by the scene-stealing Catherine “Cat” María Rodríguez as Jurgen’s Frankenstein-cum-Rocky digital online avatar Eva María, who helps them spread alt-right queer propaganda—fake news, if you will—and populate Gayman Island. Click for larger view View full resolution Patrick Foley and Michael Breslin in Circle Jerk. (Photo: Courtesy of Fake Friends.) [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Catherine “Cat” María Rodríguez in Circle Jerk. (Photo: Courtesy of Fake Friends.) Although Circle Jerk seemed like a roller coaster with far too many loop-the-loops, it perfectly captured the ways that memes penetrate popular culture in 2020. As such, the show and its host of characters were eerily familiar even if audiences might not dare to admit that. Through the production, Circle Jerk questioned white gay male supremacy and its influence on queer culture. To do this, the show focused on the proliferation of meme culture. The third act completely broke free of all constraints and became a dizzying array of TikTok performances, embodied memes, and popular culture references. In Circle Jerk’s signature style, the more references that the audience understood, the more implicated the audience became. For white gay men, especially, Circle Jerk held a mirror up to the community and revealed the myriad ways that white queer men are always entangled regardless of how alert to society’s injustices they are. Circle Jerk exemplified the full integration of Tik-Tok culture into live theatre. The script even refers to the show’s rousing finish as a “Meme Ballet.” Although TikTok only emerged in the United States market in fall 2018, it quickly became the de facto social-media platform for Gen Z. When the COVID-19 pandemic stopped live performance in March 2020, TikTok—and a host of other apps—filled the entertainment gap, becoming critical sites to watch short-form video content. TikTok is a seductive world that strives to leave viewers...

The Evolution of Identity Politics