When the Call is Coming from Inside the House: Understanding White Supremacist Infiltration in the Age of Trump

• In Event: 50426 - Far-Right Extremism Inside the Government

Abstract

This presentation begins by asking, “How has white supremacist propaganda reshaped the US political and social landscape?” To answer this question, I draw from ethnographic fieldwork, intensive life-history interviewing, and archival research, including a close analysis of US government propaganda circulated over the past 18 months. The presentation highlights a revised conception of white supremacist ‘infiltration’ to help describe not only what has developed over the past 18 months but over the past decade. As part of this revised conception, I argue for the central importance of grassroots or bottom-up-generated propaganda and its capacity to help produce micro-, meso-, and macro-level changes. Propaganda functions as one of the key mechanisms for circulating practices, ideas, and emotions that define the far-right constellation currently overwhelming US democracy. Moreover, propaganda offers a lens to assess the extent to which explicit white supremacist appeals have become (re)normalized, as exemplified by the Trump administration’s routine promotion of these appeals, including institutionalizing them as formal policy, as is the case, among many other examples, with the executive actions that provide White South Africans privileged status for resettlement in the US.

Author

• Peter Simi, Chapman University