Male white supremacy is real and white suppression of minorities, particularly Black and Brown people along with gender minorities and women, absolutely permeates every aspect of our society, from business to culture to governance.
Without setting aside that reality, it’s useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis.
All over social media people are asking, “Why would anybody embrace fascism? Why would they be willing to overthrow a functioning democratic republic?”
And why now, instead of forty or more years ago?
The answer is simple: their perception of their own safety.
Safety is at the foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. If a person doesn’t feel safe, they’re not able to even think about other dimensions of life.
If you’re crossing a busy street and stuck in the middle as cars are whizzing by on both sides, you’re not thinking of your job opportunities or the next car you want to buy or even what’s for dinner or your love life. You just want to get safe!
And, increasingly, working class white men in America are feeling unsafe as America is conspicuously becoming browner. They’re told daily by an entire movement based in the GOP — which includes over 1500 right wing talk radio stations, rightwing television networks, and hundreds of publications — that straight white men have targets on their backs.
Adult Hispanics in Texas, for example, outnumbered whites for the first time this decade. It’s a new and shocking feeling for a group that’s been in power for over 400 years, and — as we’re seeing with DeSantis and Abbott’s cruel fraud against asylum seekers and all the love it’s getting on Fox “News” — producing a predictable backlash.
Racism, homophobia, and misogyny have gone from the margins, kept to oneself, and blown into the mainstream, being amplified and celebrated daily by Republican politicians busing and flying brown-skinned asylum seekers around the country, to open attacks on teaching Black history in schools, to rants on radio and podcasts.
In 1981 Ronald Reagan and the GOP began a 40-year project to disempower and gut the American middle class wage earners, which was then mostly made up of white men.
He wanted to take away their wealth and their safety.
There was an actual rationale for this, laid out by Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind that I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Kirk argued that without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control — society would devolve into chaos.
He and his followers essentially predicted in 1953 that if college students, women, working people, and people of color ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, all hell would break loose.
(Keep in mind, this was at a time when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband or father’s signature.)
Throughout the 1950s, Kirk developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot.
But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.
Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning.
Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargos of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.
The white male power structure freaked out. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night.
Nixon demanded “law and order,” a euphemism for preventing students, women, striking union workers, or people of color from acquiring political and social power and the wealth that usually accompanies it.
He put into place his War on Drugs to, as his right-hand man John Ehrlichman famously noted, overtly criminalize being Black or an anti-war or pro-civil rights hippy.

Nice try sweetie.
But it isn’t me .
If you think I’m a communist , it’s because you are a fascist .
It can’t add up any other way.
I need to be a Communist to promote your boogiemen politics of Fascism.
If I say I’m a patriotic American ,
You say I’m a communist .
I need to be a communist to enable all of your ffed up Fascistic Behavior.
Where are the patriotic Americans in your per view ?
Name one .
Are they now serving time for
Seditionist Insurrectionist Treasonous activities ?