Victims, Real and Imaginary

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"I would certainly say, as I think I've said consistently in the past, that racially motivated violent extremism specifically of the sort that advocates for the superiority of the white race is a persistent evolving threat. It's the biggest chunk of our racially motivated violent extremism cases for sure and racially motivated violent extremism is the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio." 

Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray testifying before congressional committee in March of 2021

The United States is developing a rich if not profoundly checkered history of defining victimhood. The great polarization is built on the premise of those to be blamed and those who are destined to be suffering targets. The entire notion of anti-CRT legislation is to erase teaching of a racist past enforced by violence perpetrated by White settlers under the color of laws and practices they imposed on everyone in the land. The goal: not to make White children today feel guilt for the past legacies of slavery and discrimination, which were purportedly eliminated by the passage of Constitutional amendments and the spate of civil rights legislation and judicial rulings of the mid-1950s and beyond.

MAGA doctrine explains that today’s racism is practiced against White Americans, the “true” victims, in the form of diversity practices in university admissions and discriminatory favoritism towards people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement, now fading from power anyway, is viewed as radical socialism aimed at suppressing rightful White dominated political power and pushing for the defunding of police. A completely fabricated “organization” – Antifa (“anti-fascist”), with no formal membership or other physical presence – is blamed for fighting law and order and attempting to marginalize true American values. Police bodycams, smartphone videos and CCTV cameras have produced massive tangible proof of continued discriminatory practices, including the tsunami of video evidence of the January 6th insurrection, often generating a MAGA response of complete denial.

Where White perpetrators have mounted serial shootings against those of minority ethnic, religious or racial status, the standard response is to blame “lone wolves” for the carnage… even those such “lone wolves” are almost uniformly linked to others of similar persuasion in online social media and chatrooms where their toxic philosophies and weapons experiences are widely shared. There is no notion that voter suppression, anti-diversity rulings, anti-CRT statutes, silencing Black legislators in red states sessions, enabling wider ownership of unregulated or lightly regulated guns (including the toxic “stand your ground” laws) and the “fine people” message of the highest MAGA leaders in the land have any provocative or survivalist impact on those minority communities. Law enforcement that does not adhere to these White values is uniformly seen by many MAGA Americans as the enemy.

As Jaweed Kaleem, writing for the September 1st Los Angeles Times puts it: “Racist attacks now a way of life in the U.S… From Charleston to Pittsburgh to Jacksonville, killings inspired by hate mark a disturbing trend… In a report released this year, the Anti-Defamation League tallied extremist mass killings and attempted ones, finding that 46 took place since the 1970s. Each was at the hands of extremists motivated by far-right, far-left or radical Islamist ideology, with a small number connected to lesser known extremist ideas. But since 2011, it’s been right-wing extremists behind the majority of attacks. Most of those were carried out by white supremacists.

‘We not only have an epidemic of gun violence in this county but rising activity by white supremacists trying to spread their ideas, which can also be seen in more white supremacist attacks,’ said Oren Segal, director of the ADL Center on Extremism. “Since 2011, excluding Jacksonville, there were 26 mass casualties tied to extremism. In the 40 years before that, it was 20.’… The ADL found two recent years — 2021 and 2020 — when no deadly mass shootings or violent attacks spurred by extremism took place. Still, the civil rights group found that right-wing extremist violence and activity grew overall each year.” Kaleem goes on to list the more prominent such mass killings this year, with way too many involving legally purchased assault weapons. I hardly have room in this blog even to list those cowardly murders.

But the reliance on victimization argument is at the heart of the MAGA GOP, and the Trumpian “I’ve done nothing wrong” but the “deep state is out to get me… and you’re next” oft-repeated mantra is now the gospel to legions of the MAGA base, estimated to be around 30% of the American voting constituency. Indeed, a supermajority of that base believe Trump’s presentation of the “facts” over any other source… being family, pastors or even the hard visual evidence that is abundantly available. Thus, tens of millions of Americans believe that the true modern day American “victims” are White traditionalists and their leaders, particularly the Trump crew of indicted election-charged miscreants. This notion of White victimization is the underlying rational for so much conservative vitriol, violence and even legislative/judicial rulemaking.

Watching Trump’s legal team foist delaying tactics on various courts, in the hopes of vitiating federal prosecution (pardons or simply switching off the DOJ) and even sweeping away state prosecutions under notions of federal preemption or a rising red tide of angry voters and state legislators ready to terminate the Georgia prosecution by hook or by crook. Getting the House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Republican Jim Jordan with his own spate of scandals, to focus on crushing both state and federal anti-Trump prosecutions is just part of this massive MAGA effort to play the victim “weaponization of the justice system” card as somehow a effort to preserve essential American values.

Even Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows is fighting for a notion that as Trump’s federally employed aid, his actions cannot be prosecuted under any state law. It is a claim that many of the indicated co-conspirators seem to have adopted. To me it does seem like a usurpation of the fully rejected claims of the Nuremberg Nazi defendants following WWII that they were not guilty because they were just “following orders” from their superiors. We are watching those for unlawfully trying to reverse the results of the 2020 election increasingly rely on a theory of “immunity under the Supremacy Clause, which identifies the U.S. Constitution and federal laws as ‘the supreme law of the land.’ The argument is that no matter how offensive Meadows’ conduct might have been to the state, the supremacy of federal law prevents charging him with a Georgia crime.” Harry Litman writing for the September 1st LA Times.

The vulnerability of all of these prosecutions has to be to find entire panels of jurors all willing to be impartial, not driven by political preferences or conspiracy theories, in evaluating the evidence against the former highest leadership in the land. A lone dissenting juror on such panels can throw a giant monkey wrench in this search for accountability and justice. So let me be perfectly clear, those MAGA defendants screaming as if they were the true victims in America today are among the most serious threats to democracy this nation has ever witnessed. I’m Peter Dekom, and in the end, the real victims in all of this have to be those American who believe in democracy, fairness and equality… assuming there are enough of us.