Wow. Thank you for ALL of this! But what happens to the Proud Boys and Y'all Qaida when Trump loses? They don't go home and quietly lick their wounds and think about the error of their ways... a Trump loss is the galvanizing event for them. A Biden landslide is even more galvanizing because it isn't proof that Americans are better and more tolerant and repudiate everything Trump stood for... it's because the election was stolen. The President is illegitimate. And we can predict all the old Michigan Militia platform planks they will pull out of the closet to become domestic terrorists. What do we do about them...? (In another thread, mk called them the disaffected 10% that aren't happy with the result, and work actively against the winners to undermine their every effort. All it takes is a few shitheads with ARs and Biden has to clamp down... further strengthening the righteous resolve of the 10%...)
Not sure which sobriquet I prefer, Y'allQaeda or Vanilla ISIS. I've had a patch on my hooligan bag since December 2016: Nobody wants to talk about it, but the modern Klan is largely a Hollywood construct. DW Griffith made it cool to run around in white hoods burning crosses to protect the master race, so a bunch of white racists put on white hoods and burned crosses and terrorized Black people. Woodrow Fucking Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. It did $100m at the box office, back when a Duesenberg SSJ was five thousand dollars. We had a great run where screaming white men with torches were simply not tolerated outside of primal scream therapy. That all changed with Birtherism and the media both-sidesing the issue. Now here we are with brodozers and bear spray. Lawn darts went away. 3-wheel ATVs went away. Hoverboards went away. 4Loko went away. All were mourned by their proponents. I grew up with a bunch of racists. Literal skinheads. They were, almost to a man, "woo hoo!" racists as opposed to "let me share with you my highlighted copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" racists and frankly, in an environment that condemns the performance of racism they were largely fine. Hung out with native americans, hung out with hispanics, were forced to be polite to the handful of african americans that were about. Shit gets dangerous when you let them 1-up each other in performative racism. Before too long some asshole is driving a Dodge Challenger through a crowd. In no way do I mean to diminish the very real problem of latent racism. But the problems of latent racism are less immediate than the problems of active racism. And an environment that is hostile to active racism has less of it than an environment that isn't.