It didn’t take a crystal ball to know that with an Obama win white supremacists and racists would have a great deal of emotional angst to deal with.
It didn’t take Sarah Palin and John McCain fanning the flames to know that no good could come out race baiting during this campaign. Especially if Obama won. We now know that the Secret Service had to go to the McCain campaign and tell them to tone it down because threats against Barack Obama and his family were up, and that increase coincided with the beginning of the race baiting tactics of the campaign.
Michelle Obama even broke down asking why the McCain campaign would want to make people hate them. As an African American woman she already understood there was enough hate out there, and it didn’t need any help.
(more over the jump)
Watching the very white McCain campaign, play with race baiting seemed more like a child playing with matches. Vaguely knowing that it could hurt, but not understanding the immediacy or the strength of the danger. I’m going to harken to better angels here, because the opposite is a candidate who would willfully incite death against his opponent and his family. That happens in countries with great power struggles between power hungry megalomaniac ego maniacs, not here. If it has indeed come here, with this campaign, our country has fallen so badly that without a kind of "Life Alert" or "Lifeline" for lone superpowers, it will not be able to get back up.
It didn’t take a crystal ball to know that with an Obama win the operating thesis of the white supremacist would be threatened. With a black man set to or to actually occupying the most powerful office in the world the ideas that whites are superior and the master race of the world, would be threatened. So threatened that for those who hold these ideas to survive, to go on living, they would have to make sure Obama did not.
Or failing to kill Obama, they will have to make sure that other African Americans or other minority "mud people" communities will not begin to think that could do or be anything they wanted. They would be better served to make Obama an anomaly to those communities. In the white supremacists minds the whole order of the world, their whole place in the world, has been challenged and shaken, and they will have to correct it.
Actually they may well feel that is only up to them, and they are the only ones who can and will do it.
There is an historical increase of threats against a new president right after an election. This is because anything "new" is threatening. It’s a shame that McCain/Palin really harped on that, but there you are. With Obama’s win, however, law enforcement seeing more than threats ever before.
The Secret Service cautions that not all threats against Obama are racially motivated and can’t be assumed to be. Part of their job is to tamp down fear, especially for those of us who see every window and roof top in an open space event where Obama is speaking as a potential sniper’s perch. But they also can’t discount any threat they or other law enforcement is made aware of.
Since Barack Obama’s election the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has held one news conference in Georgia to deal with graffiti that had racist undertones. This only promises to get worse as membership in racist organizations grow.
Stormfront,* a popular white supremacist web site (also one of the oldest, it has been on the web for at least 10 years) increased it’s membership by 2,000 the day after the election.
"I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed."
- Stormfront poster, Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas
Like many of us, the increase of racist and white supremacist organization membership growth, activity and threats is not surprising to Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
"The overwhelming flavor of the white supremacist world is a mix of desperation, confusion and hoping that this will somehow turn into a good thing for them,"
- Mark Potok
The right wing talk show host quick catch logs of:
- affirmative action (did you lose your job or a spot in medical school because it went to an under qualified black)
- immigration
- diversity
- culture war
- smaller white population growth (make more white babies)
will be thrown on the pyre, stoking it. These ideas will catch and light quickly and be the match to the burning cross.
This will get worse before it gets better. While we may not see 1960s Civil Rights events the GOP and the right will have to make a choice, stand with the flame throwers or stand with their old purported enemies; American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), NAACP and the SPLC.
Our choice has already been made, and now is time to man the battlements and the fire stations.
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source
* = I'm not linking to the website.